


the princess and the paladin

by thir13enth



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Drabble Series, F/M, Fluff
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-28
Updated: 2017-12-31
Packaged: 2018-07-27 05:40:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 30
Words: 25,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7605817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thir13enth/pseuds/thir13enth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>fifty ways to say i love you - shallura drabbles<br/>master list of all prompts <a href="http://ahumanintraining.tumblr.com/post/148079083612/the-princess-and-the-paladin">here</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. nothing tastes quite as sweet

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **prompt:** chocolate.  
>  chapter dedicated to [shiroallura](http://shiroallura.tumblr.com) on tumblr.

Shiro often found odd things in his pockets but when he pulls out a deformed small bar of chocolate from deep inside the back of his sweatpants, he admits that he’s surprised that not even the Altean mice have discovered the sweet treat before him.

He unwraps it and then he sniffs it—hesitantly at first, because god knows how long that has been there and from where it even came from—but the aroma of dark bitter cocoa so strong draws him in and brings him all the way home.

He’s back to that gas station that his friends and him used to always stop by when skipping the most boring cadet academy classes. He’s back to that one peaceful winter morning when he made hot chocolate for the first time for his parents who had never heard of such a thing in their native countries. He’s back to when he remembered what a blue sky and a red sun looked like, back to when there were more stars he could recognize at night than ones he could barely pronounce the names of.

He can almost lose himself in the bittersweet memories like the bittersweet chocolate he holds in his hand, melting between the warmth of his fingers and slipping away but he doesn’t want to let the good happy past—the past before his _other_ past—go. And he can almost lose himself in the smell of nostalgia and homesickness before he’s interrupted by a curious Altean behind him.

“And what is _that_ you have there, Shiro?” she asks him accusedly.

He feels her rest her cool hand on the small of his back and he turns around, smiling sheepishly and presenting what’s in his left hand. “Chocolate,” he tells her.

She’s unimpressed—and understandably so, because in its current state, it looks like nothing pleasant.

“Try some,” he offers, handing it to her.

She wrinkles her nose so hard that the pink wings under her eyes crinkle. “It looks hideous.”

“Just a little melted,” he explains. Then with a grin, he adds, “Space goop doesn’t look much different.”

She keeps her original judgments and her facial expressions don’t waver, but she takes a risk and takes the chocolate bar from him. She lifts it to her nose and takes a whiff. And then she bites off half—and her eyes widen because she doesn’t expect it to be so brittle—and slowly rolls it in her mouth.

He’s completely entertained by her utter confusion. The furrowing of her eyebrows, the blink of her lashes, the pursing of her lips.

He smiles. “Delicious, no?”

“It’s _good_ ,” she tells him. It sounds like a question.

He doesn’t think she’s unsure though. She drops the remainder of the chocolate into her mouth and unravels the wrapping, trying to read the foreign characters on the paper.

“Chocolate?” she asks him, when she looks back up at him—and her accent makes the word sound that much more adorable in her voice.

“Yes,” he affirms. “Chocolate—one of the best things about Earth.”

“Mmm,” she says, nodding her head and folding the wrapper into quarters like she’s about to keep it for later reference. And then she realizes—

“Oh, quiznak! I didn’t ate it all without even asking if you wanted a bite! I’m so _so_ sorry!”

He laughs quietly. “The smell of it was more than enough for me.” He steps forward and wraps his arms loosely around her waist, bringing her into him. “I’d rather have seen you enjoy it.”

She steps further into his embrace in return of his gesture, but she clasps her hands together and looks down at the wrapper, where there is barely a smudge of chocolate left. “But I didn’t leave you even _one_ bit!”

He touches their foreheads together, noticing some chocolate hiding at the corner of her lips.

“Yes you have,” he assures her softly. And then he brings his lips down to taste his sweet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i don't know where the chocolate came from either.


	2. only the most beautiful

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **prompt:** in the snow.  
>  chapter dedicated to [queenalluraofaltea](queenalluraofaltea.tumblr.com) on tumblr.
> 
> master list of all prompts [here](http://ahumanintraining.tumblr.com/post/148079083612/the-princess-and-the-paladin).

“You never told me about this,” Shiro murmurs, turning a dial on the control board before looking up to observe what would happen. He squints up at the ceiling of the simulation room, seeing misty water droplets fall from overhead.

“Well I just discovered this function myself,” she insists, but there’s a glint in her eye that makes Shiro think that Allura very well knew all along that the simulation room was capable of mimicking all sorts of kinds of background environments.

He gives her a suspicious look. “What kind of a princess doesn’t know every single thing that goes on her castle?”

She teases back a smile. “Oh…maybe just a princess that was asleep for about ten thousand years.”

He turns his head toward her, making eye contact for a moment. “Fair enough,” he replies in a sigh, before leaning forward to kiss her on the forehead. He turns back to the control panel and rotates another dial, causing the temperature of the room to drastically plummet.

Upon feeling the sudden onset of goosebumps over his skin—even underneath his tight-fitting and very warm bodysuit—he smiles, holding back a shudder.

Allura, on the other hand, visibly shivers and hugs herself. “What could you _possibly_ be doing?” she snaps at him, teeth chattering. “Why are you making it so cold?” She grows a little in size, increasing her height just so that she can peek over his shoulder to see.

“I’m making it snow,” he explains briefly to her, glancing back up toward the top of the room.

“Whatever it is, I don’t like this _snow_ ,” she tells him immediately. “I can’t—“ and then she interrupts herself when she notices her own words are foggy up in front of her. “Shiro, look! My exhales are turning into clouds—turn it back to a more tolerable temperature!”

Said paladin laughs softly, breath like smoke.

“The last time my family went to Japan, we went to the snow festival,” he simply explains, watching the snow fall, watching the snow clump into each other on the way down to the ground.

“Japan?” she repeats.

He smiles, his eyes unmoving from the sight. “Yeah. Japan.”

“So there’s snow in Japan?”

“The most beautiful snow,” he says softly.

Allura can see the nostalgia behind his eyes, and she gives him a quiet tick.

In just another silent moment, and now, the simulation room has collected about an inch-and-a-half of snow.

“Come on,” Shiro offers, upon seeing this. His eyes brighten, and impatiently, he heads toward the deepest part of the snow. He takes Allura’s wrist and takes her in with him—and as much as she opposes, her feet follow him, crunching the snow beneath her steps.

He kneels down and gathers snow, compacting a handful of snow into a small sphere. It’s cold—cold enough to not only feel his icy fingers on his left hand, but cold enough for the metal of his right hand to stiffen and for the machinery to whir a little slower. He smiles—it’s as if he could actually feel again.

After evolving the snow into a ball, he presents it to the princess, who doesn’t seem to appreciate the perfection that he’s formed in his hands.

She furrows her eyebrows questioningly, peering at it. “And so what of this?”

“Now,” he says, with the slightest smirk, “you can throw it.”

Her eyes widen as she sees his right arm raise far above his shoulder, the snowball in his hand—and he sees in her eyes that she very suddenly and very clearly understands _exactly_ what is about to happen.

She yelps and then shields her face, but he shows no mercy, hurling the snowball at her shoulder. Snow splays all over her and she yelps at first—before spilling into giggles and quiznaks.

Shiro holds back an immense desire to scoop her up in his arms, because she is just looking so damn adorable with a big you-got-me smile stretched over her face, but he steps back when he sees her bend down to gather some snow in her hands. Allura now has a wicked grin on her face, and she claps her hands together to mimic how she had previously seen Shiro assembling a snowball, but the snow slips from her brown fingers and the rest of it crumbles into snowy dust.

Frustrated for just a moment, she scowls before trying again, but finds that sculpting snow is actually a lot more difficult than she originally anticipated.

He bites back a smile and steps forward to help her, scooping some snow in his hand. “Here, look. What you do is take some snow and then—“

But then she simply gives up on making a ball all together, gathering a huge amount of snow from the ground between her forearms and hurling it at his face.

One moment, he can see—the next, his face feels like it got hit by an avalanche and he can feel snow trickling down his collar, icy water trailing down his chest and back. He hears her laughing out loud and he immediately pushes off the snow from his eyes.

“Well I suppose you can do that too,” he tells her, wiping his brow with an equally wet sleeve. “But if you’re going to play that way…”

And this time, he does not hold back.

He tackles her into the snow, kisses and all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...so what if it's the summer and we're nowhere near temperatures for snow?


	3. two left feet and two right feet make a pair

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **prompt:** rhythm
> 
> master list of all prompts [here](http://ahumanintraining.tumblr.com/post/148079083612/the-princess-and-the-paladin).

The very moment Lance discovered the great acoustics of the central command room, there was absolutely nothing that Coran could do to stop the dark-haired dark-eyed and very ambitious teen from setting up a dance party at the heart of all the castle-ship’s controls.

And so that very night, the constellation map and digital pens lying on the meeting table were brushed off the long meeting table and replaced with a boombox and speakers that Pidge had been forced to fix earlier that day, in exchange for control of the first twenty songs that would be played.

Astute as ever, Keith immediately called the twenty-first song, but Lance insisted that his boyfriend allow him the choice instead—and the one after that one, too.

Point is, eventually every Paladin, princess, mechanic, and mouse ended up on the cold metal floors of the central command room in the castle-ship sailing thousands of light-years away from any of their homelands, and whether they wanted to or not, Hunk was set on making sure everyone didn’t keep their comfort zones from stepping in time with the bass—even if that meant calling Shiro and Allura out.

“Shiro! Allura!” Hunk casually bellows at them, stepping toward them with a big fat smile. “Why don’t you two join the festivities?”

The Black Paladin returns a soft and abashed smile. “That’s alright. I’m enjoying the party as is.”

“Yes,” the princess agrees. “I’m quite fine here, thank you.”

Hunk can tell that he had interrupted a rather intimate conversation. Shiro’s cheeks are just a bit flushed and Allura’s lips carry the faintest of a grin.

Hunk can also tell that they want to go back to this conversation as soon as possible—given he leaves.

“What do you mean? Come dance with us!” Hunk encourages them.

“Well,” Allura reasons, glancing behind Hunk. “Everyone seems to already have picked out partners to dance with.”

Shiro looks behind Hunk as well, and agrees, “Yeah, and unless Allura wants, there isn’t really anyone to dance with.”

“Then just both of you dance _together_ ,” Hunk suggests.

“Oh, haha, yeah!” Shiro says, turning to the princess as if just noticing that she’s been there along. “Of course!”

“I suppose we have no choice,” Allura adds.

“I don’t think we’d offer you another choice,” Hunk simply states.

There’s a silence that ensues afterward that tells Hunk that both Shiro and Allura had been under the impression that they were fooling everyone by pretending that they were not at all, in fact, exchanging glances, making inside jokes, and sneaking into each other’s beds, and that they were ”just friends.”

“Oh please, _everyone_ knows that you two are involved,” Hunk confirms.

“E-Everyone?” Shiro stutters.

“Was it that obvious?” Allura asks, narrowing her eyes. “Are you _sure_?”

Hunk sighs. “Yes.”

It’s in that moment that Allura decides that keeping her relationship “under the table” is not worth missing a chance to _move_ with Shiro and so she immediately picks herself up and offers a hand to her other half.

“Dance with me,” she asks him.

He looks up at his princess and admits to her, “I can’t dance.”

She is undeterred. “Neither can I.”

And so they rise, and hand-in-hand join the others—and no one is surprised when Shiro places his hand on her waist and pulls her in much closer than he would any “just friend.”

Hunk deems his mission to get everyone on the dance floor complete—as well as his plan to “just tell Shiro and Allura that everyone already knows” to thwart Pidge’s effort to see “just how long the two of them would try to keep their relationship under the radar”—and so he shuffles back to the boombox and waits for his opportunity to pick the song while no one notices.

Shiro isn’t lying when he says he can’t dance, and neither is Allura. They laugh more than they dance, they hesitate more than they lead, and they trip over each other more times in a minute than they have ever tripped over each other falling in love.

They’ll never beat Keith and his partner at the game—not while Lance is the self-proclaimed merengue professional—and even if the two of them are bickering between every step about what direction to head next, Shiro and Allura have no chance at keeping up.

They try anyway, and the mistakes blend into the background.

He has two left feet, and she has two right. He can’t dance for his life, and she can’t keep to a beat if the universe dependent on it—but between their bumping hips, stolen kisses, hushed giggles, and murmured whispers, they make a music of their own.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lol sorry, there was no sense to this drabble. this was literally just fluff without plot.
> 
> (also i don't think i quite hit exactly what i wanted out of hunk's characterization *sigh*)


	4. her lips are meant to be kissed

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **prompt:** irresistible.  
>  master list of all prompts [here](http://ahumanintraining.tumblr.com/post/148079083612/the-princess-and-the-paladin).

When he leaned in to kiss her for the first time, he worried she wouldn’t know what he meant with his lips.

Kissing, after all, was only something he learned—only something he discovered through the cracks of his parent’s fingers when they covered his seven-year-old eyes during steamy parts of romantic movies he didn’t understand; only something he imagined doing in the back of movie theaters as a schoolboy when he felt his voice growing deeper and his shoulders growing broader; only something he experienced maybe once or twice with someone whose name and face he’s long forgotten before he became too busy flying spacecraft in 12-hour shifts.

Kissing was only something he learned—a human thing to do—and whether that translated in space, he didn’t know.

But when he first made the move to kiss her, she didn’t hesitate once to reciprocate, with her hands in his hands, her body against his body, her lips over his lips, her tongue on his tongue, as if there was no question at all.

And as the days passed and with all the suns and moons of whatever galaxies they were passing, he found her coming back to him like there was some thread of gravity between them. Without word, without warning, without worry, she would wrap her arms around his neck and press her lips onto his—so hard so sudden so irresistibly she’d take his breath away, so hard so sudden so irresistibly it was like she was living out her last seconds of life and she _needed_ him.

And as they traveled deeper and farther into the unknown reaches of the galaxy, her lips grew softer and her kisses grew longer, and at times they would fall pressed against each other into bed and when they finally broke apart, he would open his eyes and realize that it was already the next day.

And he wonders if perhaps kissing isn’t learned after all. If perhaps, her lips are meant for him to kiss.

So now, tonight—as every other night—he presses a kiss onto her mouth—folds their breaths together, collapses their limbs into each other’s embrace, closes his eyes so that he can shut out everything in the universe but her—and he wonders if there’s even a reason for him to ever pull away from her lips.

But he remembers how deep he fell into her aqua eyes, how safe he feels in her open arms, how warm he feels pressed up against her skin, how fast his heart beats when his face is buried in her silver hair, his arms wrapped around her waist—and he wonders how such perfection exists beyond her kiss.

He remembers this—and realizes that yes, her lips are meant to be kissed; but she meant to be _loved_.

He thinks all these things _—_ her in all her beautiful glory, her in all her alluring strength –and this, he decides, is more than enough reason to pull away from her lips to admire her.


	5. she is not afraid of him

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **prompt:** hold my hand  
>  master list of all prompts [here](http://ahumanintraining.tumblr.com/post/148079083612/the-princess-and-the-paladin).

Sometimes he regrets the shivers she disguises in her sighs when he brushes her skin with even just the very tips of his cold metal fingers.

It’s like caressing her with her worst horrors—like reminding her that the enemy she’s been fighting for tens of thousands of years _lies_ under the same sheets as her, _touches_ her, _kisses_ her, _embraces_ her and never lets her go.

Then there are times he is so glad to have her—warm, breathing, alive—in his arms because he’s still haunted by memories of times he was alone in a prison in a Galran ship where everything was cold or dead and he would will himself to never dream about the Sun or Earth or his home or the beach and the sand and the summer again because that would make him crave the warmth that much more.

And he feels ever so guilty for settling his hand over her. Even more so for deriving comfort from it all.

He whispers sorrys, croons apologies each time he sees the goosebumps that rise over her shoulders, each time she stiffens when he traces his hand up her thigh, each time she holds her breath when he wraps his arm around her waist.

But each and every night she assures him that she is not afraid, and that his left hand is just as cold as his right hand from being out of the blankets for so long.

He could believe her—and a goodnight’s kiss to her forehead is his unsaid lie to her that he does—but he still falls asleep worrying that when he wakes up the next day, she would no longer be breathing and alive.

But each and every morning she wakes before him, and when he jolts awake from a nightmare he’s already forgotten, she’s always lying beside him—warm.

Each and every morning, she rises from bed and she stands to face yet another day, but before she walks forward, she always looks back for him, as if she couldn’t imagine living _without_ him.

“Hold my hand,” she says—and she offers her own to him, brave and confident and without a moment’s hesitation for which hand he returns to her.

He’s struck by the light in her eyes and the bright of her smile, and he thinks of how fortunate for him that the stars and planets aligned for him to end up standing before her.

“Hold my hand,” she repeats.

And so he does.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this chapter was a little underwhelming, and also for my lack of updating! i've been just a tad more busy as of late :/


	6. she trips over his name

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **prompt:** tongue-tied.  
>  chapter dedicated to [onemerryjester](onemerryjester.tumblr.com), who is such a wondrous and kind and supportive reader.
> 
> master list of all prompts [here](http://ahumanintraining.tumblr.com/post/148079083612/the-princess-and-the-paladin).

Her tongue trips over his name, and she’s certain this isn’t because his name has one more syllable than any of the other Paladin’s Earth-originating names or because her Altean tongue can’t roll his vowels smoothly.

No, this is because last week—sometime between official meetings and rather _unofficial_ one-on-one time together—he told her in a soft whisper that she could call him Takashi if she wanted.

And ever since then, she’s tried to use his real name, she could never bring herself to do so because for some reason calling him that just seemed so much more _intimate_.

But today, after rehearsing a million or more times to herself, she’s ready to call him—

“Takashi.”

He responds as promptly as ever.

“Allura,” he greets her, but his tone of voice tells her that he’s noticed the difference.

She takes a seat right beside him, squatting down and looking up through the glass ceilings of the castle-ship at the passing galaxies. She pretends that tonight is like any other night—one where they both meet here at the observation deck to watch the stars and as the hours pass they slowly inch closer and closer to each other until their hands and shoulders meet and they embarrassedly admit it’s probably time to head to their rooms for a good night’s sleep.

She pretends that tonight is like any other night—and that she doesn’t know that he’s still watching her face, trying to read her to figure out what made tonight the night she chose Takashi over his nickname.

She resists turning her head to look at him—staring straight into space above them—but she can hear his smile, as well as when he tucks it away.

Tonight, the silence between them is loud. So loud that her shy question pops right out of her mouth.

“What does your name mean?” she asks him finally, gazing over in his direction.

He looks surprised at her question, and his head tilts to the side. He’s trying to remember the answer to a question that he hasn’t been asked for a very long time. After all, in space, there aren’t quite enough Earthlings around to really want to highlight their differences.

“Silver,” he replies, after a tick. “Shirogane means silver.” But then he corrects himself. “But it doesn’t mean much. It’s just my last name.”

She shakes her head. “You told me that. I want to know what Takashi means.” She offers him a smile, and adds, “If I’m going to call you Takashi, I want to know what Takashi means, too.”

He returns a smile, but then he hesitates. “Depends,” he finally answers.

She furrows her eyebrows. “What do you mean it depends?”

He takes a breath. “It could mean a number of things—honor, prosperity, piety—you know?”

“No, I don’t know,” she tells him bluntly.

He shrugs.

She’s not satisfied with his non-answer answer but she decides to let it go for the time being.

“What about your name?” he asks then. “I never asked you if your name had any meaning.”

She’s a little surprised at his curiosity, but she supposes his question follows their current line of conversation. “My name?”

He nods, and she thinks for a moment of how to explain it best to him.

She starts, stalling a little bit before she stitches her words together. “I guess it depends…”

“Exactly,” he suddenly interrupts.

She blinks, furrowing her eyebrows—then she remembers that she’s just given him the same kind of non-answer answer that she was frustrated with earlier. She realizes that he has a point, and so her tongue ties in embarrassment—but not before she retorts.

“I mean, I know you said your name could mean many things, but surely you know which meaning your parents gave you,” she insists.

“Yeah,” he says, and his voice trails off. He leans back against his arms and looks up at the passing galaxies through the ship’s glass ceilings. “I suppose I should have asked them before I left,” he muses.

This immediately quiets her. “O-Oh, I’m so sorry,” she apologizes.

“It’s fine,” he assures her, facing her. “Really.” His voice is steady and his eyes are calm. “I just…I guess I never realized how important…any of that would be to me.”

“I understand,” she replies, but she still feels terrible for bringing any of it up.

She knows the feeling of having never said a proper goodbye. She knows the feeling of regret when she realized so late that her time with her parents was short. She knows the feeling of a million questions burning inside her heart and without the answers to mollify her.

And so she decides to answer at least one of his questions.

“Altean names have a basic meaning,” she begins. “But the true meaning of an Altean name includes the meaning that is guided by the stars on the day that an Altean is born.” And then she adds cheekily, “It’s not something we readily share.”

“I see,” he says, with a hint of a smirk. “I must be special then.”

“Indeed,” she affirms, and then continues. “Allura is akin to the meaning of heaven, but I was born on the second rotation of the third moon and the first day in the year of the second sun, so the true and full meaning of my name is empress of the heavens that lie between the stars—or something along those lines.”

“Well,” he says, eyes bright and clearly amused. “That certainly describes you.”

She hides a blush.

“Minus your stubbornness and impatience,” he teases.

She snorts. “Too bad you’re stuck with me while we’re saving the universe.”

This makes him chuckle. “I can live with that.”

With this, she joins in his laughter.

After the last of their laughs dissolve, she thinks for a long while before she speaks.

“I think I know what your name means,” she tells him.

“Yeah?” he asks her, his eyebrow cocked.

“Yes,” she replies, hugging her knees and tilting her head down to try to meet his eyes. “I think your name means strong—stronger than any obstacle set in front of you; handsome—with a touch of age and wisdom; brave—braver than the brightest star burning alone in the bleakest galaxy; and dedicated—to no end for your friends and family.”

He turns his head toward her, a gentle smile on his lips.

“You think so?” he asks softly.

She smiles. “I know so.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wow this drabble got way out of hand. i could have just ended it after 200 words. i could have. but nooooooo i just _had_ to keep writing...


	7. dark oceans, light skies, her eyes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **prompt:** blue.  
>  master list of all prompts [here](http://ahumanintraining.tumblr.com/post/148079083612/the-princess-and-the-paladin).

Everything was

blue. The dark ocean he drowns in every night when his eyes fall shut and his mind sinks into nightmares of his past. The waves crush his chest so tight that he can feel his ribs piercing into his heart, so tight that he can’t take in a single breath.

And so he chokes, and somewhere between the sound of that and the echoes of screams crying for mercy he can hear chants—“Champion! Champion!"—begging him to be their salvation. Despondent yet still painfully sanguine, as if there is still such a thing as hope when they are light-years away from their destroyed planet imprisoned on an enemy ship. His tongue tastes of salt and iron, of blood and tears, and he suffocates because there was no air when everything was

blue. The cold ends of their fingertips, the growing cyan tinge over their lips as they come closer and closer to kissing death. He can name all of their faces. He wishes to forget who they are and everything that they care about—she is a soon-to-be mother and she misses most her husband’s embrace; he is an ambitious student and he only wants to make his father proud.

They call his name and they tell him to fight—for not just them but for everyone that they love and everyone they want to return to—and he crumbles under the weight of their expectations, under the responsibility of granting their wishes, under the pressure of their dreams on his shoulders. He is strong, but not strong enough and so he

falls into her arms as he trembles in his sleep. She tucks him into her arms and wraps him under her warm touch. She sings soothing lullabies to him between gentle kisses to the back of his neck, and she presses her chest closer against his back, curling her body completely into his. She whispers she loves him and she tells him she’s here and that he’s safe and now, everything is

blue. The glow of the command board under her palms as she guides it through the galaxies. The same color that powers the castle, the same color that gleams between the ship’s gears and veins. She controls the battlefield with him and she reminds him that she is in this fight together with him and that she will not leave him. She will not let him go. She reminds him of home, where everything is familiar and everything is

blue. The light skies of Earth so far away in his memories. Hot sticky summer days when only the clouds would dare brave the sun, when he would pray for winter despite knowing in the snow he would pray for the rain, when sugar from half-eaten popsicles would drip all over his fingers and his mother would demand he wash his hands at the hose outside before coming in for dinner to fill his stomach so full.

He could lie in this reminiscence forever but he now wonders if there is such a dream without her. Is there a future without her when he cannot even imagine one without her?

And so when he wakes, she calls his name, and he looks up at her. She holds him soft in her smile, and he sees her eyes—so open, so wide that he could fall forever in her gaze—her eyes so

blue.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry, this one was highly experimental. forgive my grammar.


	8. home is where the heart is

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **prompt:** with you.  
>  chapter dedicated to [alluran](alluran.tumblr.com) on tumblr.
> 
> master list of all prompts [here](http://ahumanintraining.tumblr.com/post/148079083612/the-princess-and-the-paladin).

She tells him of Altea.

She tells him of home—how when she was young she would wake before the king and the queen and all the knights of the castle and climb the many flights up the tallest tower to lie on the roof. She would just barely make it in time to catch sight of the purple-striped clouds over the horizon, the light of the first sunrise and second moonset spilling over blue-topped mountains covered in evergold trees.

 _“There’s two moons?”_  
_“Three actually,” she explains. “But the third only appears once every ten sun cycles.”_  
_“Sun cycles?”_  
_“Rotations of the first and second sun.”_  
_“So like years?”_  
_She furrows her eyebrows and looks at him weird. “What are years? All this time, you’ve said this word and I don’t know what or who or how they are.”_  
_He hides a laugh by biting the inside of his cheek. “They’re like…sun cycles, I guess.”_  
_She reads his amused eyes for a moment before taking a deep breath, long and heavy._  
_“I should have asked you earlier,” she sighs._

She tells him of home—how she loved to roll around in the soft cotton grasses of the hills just beyond the palace grounds. She would close her eyes and blindly search for a flower patch using just her nose and following the scent of juniberries, the bittersweet perfume of her favorite flower, and when he asks her to describe it, she uses words he can and never will understand—but he tries anyway.

 _“Sweet?”_  
_“No,” she replies, and takes a moment to capture her thoughts. “Refreshing.”_  
_“Refreshing,” he repeats._  
_“Like when you wake up in the morning and smell the fresh dust of meteor showers,” she clarifies._  
_“Like rock and dirt?”_  
_“No,” she replies. “Like sunrise.”_  
_He imagines it’s like the smell of frost on a chilly spring morning._  
_“I wish I could show you,” she says._

She tells him of home—how her mother always tried to feed her “homemade” augusteel and limepepper soup, and how she hated it because the queen was a bad cook and erred on the side of too much salt. She would eat it anyway, tolerate a small sip off a small spoon because she loved seeing her mother smile, but when Krayis would make it, she’d eat until she was so full she couldn’t feel her toes.

 _“Krayis?”_  
_“The royal chef,” she answers._  
_“Far better than your mother at cooking?”_  
_She half rolls her eyes. “ **Light years** better.”_  
_He gives out a laugh._  
_“Although I must admit that even my mother excels in comparison to your attempts,” she teases._  
_“I’m a pilot turned legendary defender of the universe—I can’t make much more than Kraft macaroni and cheese,” he retorts._  
_She wrinkles her nose. “I don’t even know what that is, but it sounds like unpleasant.”_  
_“Honestly I’d give a lot for just a single bowl of that right now.”_  
_She smiles and falls silent, retreating to her thoughts._  
_“Do you remember the time you attempted to make a grand feast in celebration of my birthday and ultimately made some kind of goo that even Coran was unwilling to eat?”_  
_He thinks hard, but he can’t recall. “No,” he says, grinning._  
_“Ah, never mind then.”_  
_“But that certainly sounds like something I would do.”_  
_Her smile remains plastered on her lips._  
_“Indeed,” she says. “It **was** something you did.”_

She tells him of Altea—and he knows that she hasn’t gone a day in this castle-ship without thinking of her home planet, where her dreams originate and her nostalgia plays. She hasn’t gone a day in this castle-ship missing her father, her mother, her people—

“If you could be anywhere in the universe, where would you be?” he asks one night when he notices her forlorn gaze into the black space sky.

She hears him but she doesn’t reply right away.

“Altea?”

She shakes her head. She parts her lips and takes a breath to answer, and then finally turns her head to look at him—her eyes sad and blue like the deepest oceans.

“With you,” she finally tells him. “I’d be with _you_.”

And when the glow of his hologram image flickers, he knows even his memories wish the same.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry. was that ending too sudden?


	9. it's easier with her

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **prompt:** grinding.  
>  also written for [shalluraweek 2016](shalluraweek.tumblr.com), **day 1** \- discovery/recovery. (yes. as always, i am very late.)
> 
> chapter dedicated to [queenallura](queenallura.tumblr.com) on tumblr. thank you for all the good shallura times thus far and soon to come.
> 
> master list of all prompts [here](http://ahumanintraining.tumblr.com/post/148079083612/the-princess-and-the-paladin).

When you startle awake in the morning, you’re drenched in sweat, your gums hurt, your skin is clammy and you can tell it was a nightmare. You can tell because your human hand is shaking and the metal one feels cold at the fingetips—and you _never_ feel anything from _that_ hand.

You close your eyes.

You don’t remember. You don’t remember—not a thing from last night, not a thing from any night before—and you don’t try to remember, and you don’t _want_ to remember because the last time you caught a glimpse of your inglorious past, you saw their fearful eyes and heard their agonized screams.

And you’ve been counting. You’re already well past the murder level of a Galran captain.

You don’t want to discover yourself. You’re afraid of what you’ll find. More weapons in your hands, more blood on your hands, more deaths on your _hands_.

All the terrible terrible decisions that _you_ made.

There’s a reason why your memories go blank before the times your hair went white and your arm turned steel and your cynicism grew large. There’s a reason, and you’re not seeking that reason, even if it means that you’ll always remain broken—just fragments of a childhood on Earth, bits and pieces of your first (and last) space exploration, and a blur of however the fuck you earned the scars that mark your skin as a soldier—everything you’ve packed and stored away in stapled and duct-taped boxes in dark cracks of your mind.

Every now and then they ask you the most simple things—what you want to have for dinner, what time it is, what you’ve done today—and you blank out because dinner reminds you of prison and the time reminds you of the battle arena and today reminds you that there was a yesterday and yesterday you were a monster and so you blank out and—

“Hey, Shiro?” asks someone. Usually red, blue, green, yellow, or Altean.

It’s always a hey. They’re always concerned.

“I’m fine,” you assure them.

And then you answer the question: “the usual green goo is fine” or “seven ticks past the hour” or “trained with my Lion.”

You make sure to time your response just right. If you take too long to reply, if you take too little to reply, if you don’t reply at all—there is follow up.

But that’s okay. Because they’ve been great about supporting you while you’re recovering (at least, that’s what you’re _supposedly_ doing) and that having flashbacks is normal. They don’t blame you for what you did or for how you are. They accept all your shattered pieces and they hold you up with both of their hands and all of their hearts.

And that feels warm. It feels like sheepishly presenting someone with a broken bottle for their birthday and swearing there was a century-old sweet wine in it and that these jagged sharp glass pieces are all that’s left and being _thanked_ and _appreciated_ and _loved_ for the effort.

And it feels so warm that for a moment, you think you might be _done_.

You’ve built yourself strong—brick by brick, layer by layer. You’re a tall tower standing straight and high and scraping the sky for a brighter future. You’ve gotten rid of all your nightmares and when your eyes fall shut you get ready for dreams and you put down the shields you’ve put up around you and you un-staple and un-duct-tape boxes you’ve tucked away in your mind because you’re _ready_ to accept who you were, and that who you _were_ is who you _are_ but not who you will _be_.

So you open those boxes in the dark cracks of your mind because you’re ready and you’re prepared and you’re strong and when you open them you find—

their fearful eyes, their agonized screams, their blood on your hands.

And then the tall tower you’ve built—brick by brick, layer by layer—topples.

You startle awake.

You’re drenched in sweat, your gums hurt, your skin is clammy and you can tell it was a nightmare—and she can, too.

“You were grinding your teeth again,” she tells you, but you already know that because your gums hurt and your jaw is tight.

She places her soft hand over your cheek and you feel your face loosen, you feel your muscles release. She looks at you with the most trusting eyes and the gentlest smile and you feel your chest let out your held breath, you feel your heart beat slow and steady.

She’s beautiful, she’s sweet, she’s wonderful, and most of all, she’s _there_.

“What happened?” she whispers. She brushes back the hair from your forehead.

You close your eyes.

You don’t try to remember, and you don’t want to remember—but this time you _do_ remember.

“I killed them,” you tell her.

She takes a breath. Her eyebrows knit together, her eyes closed, her lips frown, and she reaches her arms out to embrace you—all of you, all of your (still) broken pieces.

Recovery—you realize—is not just about taking the broken pieces and rebuilding them all up again.

It’s discovering that there are many _many_ more pieces that you lost along the way. It’s realizing that just gluing all the pieces you have will not make you complete. It’s knowing that _even_ if you’re almost there and _even_ if you’re about to stick on your last piece—sometimes you have to completely destroy how far you’ve come and start all over _again_.

Recovery is a long process, and discovering yourself is just as painful, and it’s easier said than done.

But you know what?

It’s also easier when you’re with them, and it’s also easier when you’re with her.


	10. get dressed

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **prompt:** not wearing that
> 
> also written for [shalluraweek 2016](shalluraweek.tumblr.com), **day 2** \- tradition. (...do i care if i'm three weeks behind? every week is shallura week.)
> 
> master list of all prompts [here](http://ahumanintraining.tumblr.com/post/148079083612/the-princess-and-the-paladin).

Just one look at what Allura held before her was enough to make Shiro’s nose wrinkle.

“Nah,” he says.

Allura only blinks once before she tries again. “Here,” she says, more demanding this time.

“I’m not wearing that,” he insists once more.

She frowns. “A shame,” she pouts. “Well I’m sure you would have looked absolutely _splendid_ in it.” She holds it up higher in front of her to take an extra look at the outfit assemblage – an Altean robe of white fabric lined with dark blue, with the same color dark blue of cloak to drape over the shoulders – before she drops it back down to look him in the eye. “Are you _sure_ you don’t want to try this out?”

He shakes his head to affirm the same response, a bemused smile on his face at her persistence.

“I _assure_ you it’s much more comfortable than whatever that robe was that you were wearing in that old photo of yours,” Allura scoffs.

“The kimono was actually quite soft and loose on the legs, thank you very much,” Shiro defends.

“Well it didn’t look so by the expression on your face,” she retorts.

He rolls his eyes. “I already told you that was because I didn’t want to be at the tea ceremony.”

“Tea ceremony or not, I _insist_ you try this on,” she maintains, striding toward him. “And _besides_ ,” she adds, with a smirk and a sly gaze at his bare chest, “you need at least _something_ to wear since I tossed your clothes all over the floor nowhere to be found last night.”

And then she suddenly reaches down for the bedsheets to pull them off him, but – with a tussle of laughter and playful scuffle – he’s quick enough to catch her wrist and the edge of the blankets to keep his very naked self covered.

“Fine, fine, fine,” he defers, taking the recommended outfit and slipping to the bathroom.

He doesn’t avoid the butt squeeze on his way there, and he doesn’t avoid the butt squeeze when he comes back out – now clothed proper.

“Oh, look at you,” she bubbles, skidding back in front of him to see him face to face, with her hands clasped and a big grin on her face. “You look perfectly Altean.”

He smiles softly, entertained by her hyper enthusiasm. He looks down at himself before turning his gaze to a mirror. “I suppose,” he agrees, stumbling a step forward when she suddenly embraces him from behind. “But not perfectly _Altean_ ,” he refutes. “I don’t have any wings under my eyes. And my ears aren’t pointed.”

She pecks a kiss onto his cheek.

“As if _I_ care,” she tells him.

He can’t help his smile from widening, turning his head to meet her lips. As they settle into a deep kiss, he turns his body around to face her, wrapping his arms around her waist. She giggles as they withdraw from each other, the most mischievous glint in her eyes.

“Well then,” she declares. “Now that I know that this attire fits quite attractively on you, I can ask you to marry me with the _full_ confidence that we have the proper clothing for ceremony.”

It takes him a little more than a moment to realize that what he heard was, indeed, what he heard.

“…wait, what?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i suppose that's one way to propose


	11. say it again

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **prompt:** can you hear me  
>  chapter dedicated to [ jazzzasaruss](jazzzasaruss.tumblr.com) on tumblr.
> 
> master list of all prompts [here](http://ahumanintraining.tumblr.com/post/148079083612/the-princess-and-the-paladin).

She still can’t sleep.

It’s been over half an hour since they were skin on skin, lips on lips, breath on breath and well-exhausted after what started had first started as innocent cuddles and then evolved into something less so – and she still can’t sleep.

They’ve already exchanged their thank-yous and you-were-so-goods to each other, while catching their heart rates and breaths, their lusts sobered – but even after all of that, she still finds something she desperately wants to say to him.

So over a half hour later, she wonders – does this still count as pillow talk?

Nevertheless, she turns her body back onto her side to face him, and then scoots forward so her head shares his pillow. She opens her mouth to tell him what’s been on her mind but then snaps her lips shut when she sees that his eyes are closed, his lips are slightly parted, and the wrinkles that he always seemed to have between his furrowed eyebrows are smoothed out.

She watches his chest rise and fall – calm, like he’s fast asleep – but she can never be sure because his breath is always so steady.

She doesn’t want to wake him in case he actually is sleeping, but she also doesn’t want to just leave her thoughts unsaid – especially to him, who deserves to hear them.

So she inches just a tiny bit closer and then tells him, just under her breath.

“Hm? What?” he asks, barely understandable because his lips are barely moving. “I couldn’t hear you.”

She repeats.

“What was that again?” he murmurs sleepily into the covers. “I still couldn’t hear you.”

She giggles, with a roll of her eyes – because she can see the dimple at the corner of his mouth and she _knows_ he can hear her and that he just wants her to say it again – but she decides to entertain him and whispers again into his ear — loud and clear:

“I love you.”

His eyes open and a lazy smile graces his lips. He turns his head, then the rest of his body, towards her. He tangles himself in her limbs, and he wraps one hand around her waist, tucks one leg between her knees.

He’s close enough to drown in her eyes. She’s close enough to catch his breath.

He lifts his hand to rest on her cheek. His thumb rubs her cheekbone and his fingers run her silver hair behind her pointed ear. He leans in and tells her:

“I love you”  – the same.

“Sorry, what was that you said?” she teases, the tip of her pink tongue sticking out at him from between her brown lips.

He takes a deep breath and lets out a slow sigh. He pretends she really couldn’t hear him or that he really doesn’t know that she’s playing with him, and so instead of trying his sentence again, he closes the distance between them to press a soft kiss over her mouth.

Words are never enough, anyhow.


	12. just a little crazy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **prompt:** believe  
>  chapter dedicated to [ lady-brandish ](http://lady-brandish.tumblr.com) on tumblr, [wordslinger](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wordslinger) on ao3. for a late happy birthday.
> 
> master list of all prompts [here](http://ahumanintraining.tumblr.com/post/148079083612/the-princess-and-the-paladin).

“Crazy, isn’t it?” he says.

His voice – despite how soft and gentle – breaks the silence that’s lasted through this past hour, one more later than their originally planned bedtime.

She slowly turns her head toward him, giving him a quiet laugh. “What’s so crazy, huh?”

He continues to stare up at the large expanse of dark sky, dotted with white and yellow and blue and red speckles – the stars reflect against his black eyes, and she catches a breathless moment to treasure the sight, as well as how he will never realize just how beautiful everything looks off his gaze.

“You,” he first answers, but then clarifies, “Me. You and me _—us_.”

Then he faces her and explains, “There’s a hundred billion stars in the galaxy and a trillion more that we can’t even see, and even against all the odds of infinite possibilities where I would end up in space, I find myself here lying right next to you.”

She can’t help the hot flush of her cheeks nor her growing smile, but she maintains her composure, refraining from melting into a pool of a princess because of some sappy sentimental words he said – which she hates to admit that he does too often and she hates even more to admit that she doesn’t mind at all.

“Well I suppose it _is_ rather crazy that I’m romancing a human,” she agrees. “No one from back home would ever believe me.”

The corner of his lips lift. “If I told anyone back at home that I was dating the most gorgeous alien in all of the universe, they’d think I was more than just a _little_ crazy,” he says, threading his hand under her arm to rest on her waist. “And to be honest, before I set out into space, I didn’t think there was any life outside of humankind.”

She sticks her tongue at him. “So are you saying you believe in aliens in now?” she asks him.

“Well…yes,” he admits, with a guilty pink tinge of his cheeks. “But I guess love can make you a little crazy.”


	13. he's always there

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **prompt:** in the storm  
>  master list of all prompts [here](http://ahumanintraining.tumblr.com/post/148079083612/the-princess-and-the-paladin).

When it rains, it pours—and sometimes he can’t stop her tears from falling.

When she cries, she’s silent. She makes no sound. She simply sits with her arms hugging her knees into her chest. She doesn’t move, save her fingers that tuck the messy, frazzled strands of her hair behind her ears, save the back of her hand that wipes the tears from the bottoms of her red-rimmed eyes.

When she cries, she’s silent—but she doesn’t need to say a word for him to know she hurts.

“It was today, wasn’t it?”

She doesn’t answer, and she doesn’t need to answer.

He knows it hurts to talk.

She hurts from inside out, from outside in. Her heart aches, her lungs burn, her throat tightens, her eyes itch, her nose runs, her fists clench, and the last thing she can even think about is remembering to breathe—and he can see this, and he can tell by the pinch at the corners of his frown that seeing her like this makes him hurt just the same.

He places his hand on her shoulder, and when he touches her, it’s like she suddenly recognizes that she’s still alive—not _dead_ , like who she’s mourning—and she swallows a quiet gasp of air and she says—

“I never said goodbye.”

She doesn’t say anything more, and she doesn’t need to say anything more.

He knows it hurts to lose.

When it rains, it pours—and sometimes he can’t stop her tears from falling, but he shelters her nevertheless. He simply sits with his arms hugging her into his chest. He doesn’t move, save his hands that soothingly weave in between hers, save his lips on the back of her neck that grace her with soft loving kisses from the bottom of his very heart.

And even after the storm passes, and even as the stars of the next day rise over the space black horizon—he’s still there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> meh. short and subtle, but i hope i didn't just scratch the surface.


	14. he's an acquired taste

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **prompt:** first kiss
> 
> master list of all prompts [here](http://ahumanintraining.tumblr.com/post/148079083612/the-princess-and-the-paladin).

The kiss happens inevitably—after all, can she really resist not pressing her lips against his when his eyes reflect her soul and his warmth is just under her fingertips?—but when he leans in and reciprocates, she suddenly breaks from his mouth, laughing.

He furrows his eyebrows, a curious smile over his lips. “What’s so funny?”

Her laugh—melodic and musical—carries for another second before slowly fading to a single note and then a final sigh.

“Do you remember our first kiss?” she asks him, with twinkling eyes.

He doesn’t know where she’s going with this question, and the confusion shows on his face. “Of course,” he replies. “Of course I do—it was the day we rescued you and—“

“—I was sitting downstairs thinking to myself,” she continues. “And then you came by—“

“—and I found you there and told you how worried I was about you and how relieved I was that you were back—“

“—and you leaned in and I didn’t back off, and then it happened—“

“—and then I said sorry and asked if it was okay—“

“—and I said _yes_ ,” she finishes for him. “I said yes,” she softly repeats, gazing down at his lips.

He nods, still studying her eyes. He absentmindedly lifts her hand and caresses it onto his cheek, his lips tracing her palm. “Well…what of our first kiss?” he finally asks, giving up on following her thought process.

She chews on her lip for a little bit, embarrassed to explain. He’s waiting for her to answer so intently—his dark eyes intense and focused—that she has to look away for a moment.

“You’re like junglemelon juice,” she eventually admits, turning back to face him with a cheeky smile.

The corner of his mouth curves upwards. “Junglemelon juice?” he repeats.

“An acquired taste,” she clarifies, sticking out her tongue briefly.

Indifferent, and not the least bit offended, he shrugs, as he knows he couldn’t have done anything about his past naivety. She was his first kiss—at least, of the kisses that mattered to him—and god knows if he knew what he was doing because the moment was less about their lips than it was about their feelings.

“Ah,” he says, understanding. “Like fine wine, then.”

“I don’t know what that means, but I hope you’re not giving yourself more credit than I meant,” she teases, taking back her hand from him and resting it on his shoulder.

He laughs softly, tilting his head inwards to touch foreheads. “Better with age?”

“Yes,” she says, smile widening. “Better with experience.”

Something akin to a purr rumbles in his throat and he leans in for another kiss—this one soft and soothing, passionate and lasting.

“Mmm,” she affirms, as he withdraws slowly and as her eyes reopen. “Much better.”


	15. if i had one wish

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **prompt:** shooting star
> 
> master list of all prompts [here](http://ahumanintraining.tumblr.com/post/148079083612/the-princess-and-the-paladin).
> 
>  **notes:** experimenting with first person. forgive me.

If there's one thing that I remember about your earthly ways it's this:

 

I catch you talking to yourself one night while you have a moment to yourself -- just the black night space sky above you, just the soft hum of the castle's machinery below you.

I teased you about it then. I ask you what silly thing you were doing then.

You turn your head to face me and you give me the gentlest smile. 

"I'm making a wish," you tell me. 

Then you point up into space. You follow a star with your finger.

"A shooting star," you explain.

"You're making a wish on a falling star," I remark. There's amused disbelief curled around the edge of my voice.

"Yes," you confirm, all matter-of-factly.

"A _falling_ star," I repeat. "A star that has weakened from its responsibilities."

Your eyebrows furrow. "Is that what shooting stars are?"

"Altean parents use these stars as opportunities to tell stories about why children should do their chores," I tell you. "I was reminded millions of times by my father about some star that fell when I refused to wash the dishes. He's thoroughly convinced me that whenever I ignore my duties, I rid the sky of another star -- and I don't think I've ever procrastinated anything ever again."

Your eyebrows raise. "That's commendable," you say. "I still struggle to wake up in the morning."

I wrinkle my nose. "Well part of that is because I keep you in bed," I tease.

You chuckle softly, stepping forward and pulling me into your arms. Your forehead rests against mine and you lean into me, your eyes on my mouth. Your voice turns to a soft growl. "And that you do."

I press a quick kiss on your lips before returning to the subject. "So you wish on these falling stars."

"Shooting stars," you correct.

" _Falling_ ," I insist. "You entrust your deepest desires to these stars that can't even hold themselves up in the sky."

You shrug. "Well, that's what we do on Earth."

"Stop shitting me," I laugh. "You're such a liar. You could tell me that Earthlings celebrated an annual day honoring termites, and I'd believe you."

You shrug, with a wry smile on your lips. "For some reason, I wouldn't be surprised if we did." 

"Humans are so alien," I tell you. 

You laugh quietly. We begin to rock back and forth, swaying from side to side in our embrace.

"You want to know what I wished for?"

I look up at you. "What?" I ask, but my heart flutters because I think I already know.

"Forever," you tell me. "I wished for forever with you."

 

You asked me then what I would wish for it I could wish for anything.

I didn't make up my mind. I couldn't make up my mind.

After all, wishes don't come cheap.

There's always something else to ask for, always someone else to think about, always something more that you never expect to come into play.

Wishes are definitive. Wishes are decisions. Wishes are hard to make in the present because they affect the future and you never know what is going to happen minutes, hours, days, years from now -- like how when you wished for forever with me, you didn't know forever wasn't just a concept but an entire living being that needed to take, take, _take_ in order to survive.

 

But I know my wish now, and I know I wouldn't change it for anything else.

If I had one wish, I'd ask for stars to litter the skies again.

I'd call upon all the shooting stars to shine bright in the black night space sky that you love. I'd ask them to stay strong for just a little while longer, to not fall until you've made all your wishes on them, to stay bright until all your wishes are granted.

You used to love staring up at the stars.

You used to spend hours counting them, weaving stories of their histories, watching how they twinkled and turned -- and you used to hold my hand while you did so, counting the beats of my heart, weaving your fingers between mine, watching my eyes for when I would slowly drift off to sleep so that you could teasingly lean over and kiss me back awake.

I remember your dark eyes would glimmer like the sky.

I remember seeing constellations in your gaze, reminding me of all the stories we share together.

I remember then, of that time I caught you wishing on a star to ask for forever with me.

 

If I had one wish, I'd wish you back.


	16. dark days, but it's alright

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **prompt:** broken wings
> 
> master list of all prompts [here](http://ahumanintraining.tumblr.com/post/148079083612/the-princess-and-the-paladin).

> _We're lights that never go out_  
>  _Cause you're here with me now_

She hates looking when he cries.

It's not because she hates seeing him helpless -- the back of his hand rhythmically wiping off the tears that pool at the bottoms of his eyes, the occasional sharp exhale and sniffled inhale, the blank stare of his glassy eyes.

It's not because she hates his distance -- he looks at her but keeps his silence, he knows she's there but he wraps his arms around his knees to sit alone, he watches the stars pass by in the empty space sky but he doesn't give a hint of what occupies his mind.

It's not because she hates thinking of his pain -- a similar dull ache in her chest, a hot congested ball in her throat, a cold hollow space at the center of her belly.

She hates looking when he cries because it reminds her that even someone as strong as him -- broken down, built up again -- can crack at the sound of shattered glass, at the smell of piss and blood, at the touch of a hand on his back. She hates admitting that his tears make her uncomfortable because that means she would have to admit she's looked to him to remind herself that her heart can still beat even with all her loss and guilt, and that seeing him so vulnerable makes her feel like maybe healing isn't possible after all.

But this is precisely why she needs to look when he cries.

She crouches down and holds his face in her hands. She lifts his chin and lowers her lips to his wet cheeks. She pulls him into an embrace and she waits until he opens up to reciprocate.

"It's okay," she assures him. Her voice croaks. "It's going to be alright."

He shudders and brings her in closer to him. He presses his forehead into her shoulder and exhales slowly. He releases the tension in his arms and he relaxes into her sturdy support.

"Thank you," he tells her. A weak smile forms over his face. "I'll be fine."

She sees this, and she thinks she can smile, too.

Despite the weights of responsibility and the gravity of the past pulling him down, he can still extend his scarred wings and fly.

And she can too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ugh this one took me forever to write.


	17. may i have this dance?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **prompt:** last dance  
>  **for:** [stella](stellatiate.tumblr.com), with cheers to emdashes
> 
> master list of all prompts [here](http://ahumanintraining.tumblr.com/post/148079083612/the-princess-and-the-paladin).

To remind herself of who she used to be, Allura sings to herself.

Whether in the middle of a shower, or picking out her battle outfit of the day, or doing her daily routine check up on the castle-ship, she can't help breaking out into song — whatever song, really, whether a past lullaby her mother sang to her, a rap she remembers being played loud at a party, or any of the "junk" music that she once blasted on her headphones to the dismay of her disapproving parents who believed the golden age of music had long since passed.

It doesn't matter what song or when it comes to her, she sings it. 

Sometimes it's her only to remind herself that yes, there was an Altea, and that yes, she _is_ an Altean.

And so she sings to herself.

But every now and then, the lyrics escape her, the harmony is on the tip of her tongue, and her memory fails her.

It's then that she realizes that perhaps the song is completely forgotten — without a trace of it left in history.

She shakes the thought out of her head.

 

Tonight as she slowly falls to sleep, however, she remembers that  _no_ , the songs she's forgotten are _not_ completely lost. There's a music player below the control room.

The realization is enough to throw her body out of bed, enough to drag her barefoot down to the basement.

She blows the star dust off the dashboard, thumbing away the rest of the glitter. 

She pauses for a second, looking at the blank screen. The last time she stood before the music dashboard was centuries ago — when she rolled her eyes at her father from across the room, reluctantly putting on whatever song he felt like hearing that day.

Her hand moves toward the on button, and the dashboard whirs into life. Blue and white lights flickered over the screen and after a brief loading period, the dashboard displays a familiar alphabetized list of songs.

Her smile widens, and her heart beats fast.

Hesitantly, she drags one finger on the touchscreen, reading all the titles to herself. Chords and lyrics pop up into her mind as her eyes read down the list, songs and melodies that she almost forgot existed in the first place.

It's like home. 

There's a song that trickles into her head. It's a romantic song that she remembers was popular back so many ages ago, back when there was still a culture on a quaint world called Altea, back when she had a mother and a father and friends to come back to... 

She wonders if the song is stored on the ship's database.  She wonders if she's the only one that remembers the song.

But then, as if by magic, the title appears — "Always" — and she smiles.

It's an Altean ship. _Of course_ it had all the Altean classics — her father made sure of it.

The first few chords start playing, and then the beat kicks in, and she becomes lost between the melody and the rhythm.

 

_"I don't remember a day_

_when I wasn't thinking of you?_

_Can you remember a night_

_when you didn't think of me, too?"_

 

Her eyes flicker shut, and a smile graces her face. She hums softly to herself and when the chorus begins, she can't help but gently rock her hips and sway her arms to the drums. She breathes in, and as she settles into the groove, the grin on her face grows deeper. She spins around and then —

"Oh!" she gasps when bumping into black, gray, white — his broad chest. "Shiro."

But for some reason, after her initial shock, she realizes she's not at all surprised to see him there. She's expected him to follow her. She's seen how his eyes hang onto every curve of her lips, every sway of her hips. She's seen how his eyes gleam like the brightest stars when she enters a room.

He asks, almost in a whisper, "May I have this dance with you?" 

He's leaned in, his eyes are lowered, and he is so close that she can't help but notice his long, thick eyelashes.

"I hate to see you dancing by yourself," he continues. 

"Then let this be my last dance alone," she commands, folding her fingers between his.

He moves his other hand to her back. He steps in closer.

Then on cue of the music, they move as one. 

"Is this our first dance together?" she asks him.

He smiles gently and lowers his hand to the small of her back, his mouth to her ear.

"Well," he says. "It certainly won't be our last."


	18. he learns she's a fast learner the hard way

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **prompt:** bite  
>  master list of all prompts [here](http://ahumanintraining.tumblr.com/post/148079083612/the-princess-and-the-paladin).

 He doesn't expect to teach Allura some figurative expressions from Earth while they're in the garage upgrading one of the castle-ship's emergency space pods — but things happen as they will, and while he's on a roller underneath the space pod, Shiro doesn't know any better.

His hand comes up from underneath the machinery. 

"Do you mind passing me the laser?" he asks her.

She looks down at his hand, his fingers wiggling and receptive.

"Which laser, Shiro?" she teases. "The pyrokinetic, ultrafluorescent, or infrasonic one?"

She hears him sigh deeply. "You know which one I need, Allura."

"No, actually, I have not a clue which one you need," she continues. She squats down to see him beneath the space pod.

He tilts his head backwards to look at her. "Allura." 

She sticks out her tongue. "Please specify."

"I need the standard cutting one," he says. "It's the one... ah, never mind, I'll get it myself."

He groans and then quickly rolls out from underneath the space pod —

And she catches him with an upside-down kiss, before pulling a laser gun out from behind her back and placing it into his hand.

"Is this the one you needed?" she asks, with a smirk.

He smiles, taking the laser with one hand. With his free hand, he reaches up to pull her head back down, delivering a second, much longer kiss to her lips. 

When their breath runs out, they part, keeping only a small distance apart.

"That is _exactly_ what I needed," he whispers, looking self-satisfied.

She laughs silently, and then he rolls back under the space pod.

"I hope you're not separating the recombinant fuses before we place the new propulsion device into gear," she remarks out loud, turning back to the work counter to prepare said device.

She hears some metal clunks and a few grunts from underneath the space pod before he answers.

"We're going to have to separate them anyway," he replies. "I'll just do it now while I have the laser."

Allura slowly turns around, narrowing her eyes.

"No..." she slowly retorts. "...do that _after_ we've successfully installed the new device."

"Bite me."

Her eyebrows furrow.  She suddenly reaches under the space pod, grabbing the roller — Shiro included — and pulling it out from underneath. "I'm sorry," she snaps, glaring straight down into his eyes. "Do _what_?"

He isn't fazed, simply returning a smile. "I said 'bite me.'"

She's not sure if she's more confused by his complacent demeanor or at the words that are coming out of his mouth. 

"It's an expression," he explains. "Something like the equivalent of 'I don't give two quiznaks.'"

"Bite me?" she repeats, processing the new information.

He nods, before reaching his lips up to peck her cheek. "Yes," he affirms. "Bite me."

"I see," she says, her eyes wandering, her mind distracted.

She's so deep in thought about the new expression she's learned that she doesn't realize he's rolled back underneath the space pod until she hears another clang from underneath.

"How rude," she grumbles, as a sort of late reaction. She gives him the pass to do as he wishes — separate the fuses or whatever — she's occupied with understanding the context of her new learned Earthly expression.

He thinks he's gotten away with it, but he doesn't realize that Allura's an exceptionally fast learner.

If he had known that earlier, he might have kept his mouth shut.

.

.

"Hey!" he yelps when Black lurches to the left. He stumbles to the side, grabbing onto a nearby stand to keep his balance. 

Allura laughs, enjoying herself at the Lion's steering wheel. She suddenly flicks her wrist to the right, and Black barrel rolls in that direction, making Shiro hold onto whatever he could for dear life.

"Allura, you're turning too sharply," he criticizes. "Take it easy on Black, will you?"

She swivels her head around to make eye contact with him, a sly smile on her lips.

"Bite me," she says.

.

.

His towel disappears the moment he reaches for it.

He huffs.

This is the third time this month. 

"Allura, please," he asks, peeking out from the side of the shower curtain.

Her mouth hooks up into a smirk, challenging him.

"Bite me," she says.

.

.

It's already a bad idea to sleep in the same bed as Allura when he's trying to get to sleep. She naturally tosses and turns, every now and then mumbling incomprehensible Altean that he hasn't learned quite yet — and while he most certainly stirs awake in the middle of the night with a smile on his face witnessing this, he also realizes that as a light-sleeper, he tends to lose a bit of sleep.

Tomorrow is going to be a long day, so he originally wasn't planning on spending the night with Allura, but with pleading eyes and a sad frown, she eventually convinced him to stay between her sheet and intertwined within her limbs.

"You keep me warm," she explained, as a reason for him to stay the night with her.

But he soon realizes — when feeling her hand slip further and further down his abdomen, until she reaches a hard bulge at the base of his hips — that she's kept him in bed with her for more than just an innocent cuddle. 

His head slowly rises an inch from the pillow and he leans in, his lips just tickling the edge of her jaw.

"You're not helping me," he growls.

She tilts her head up to whisper in his ear. He hears the sly smile stretched across her lips.

"Bite me," she says.

And this time, he just might.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yes, the summary to this story is a double entendre. and you didn't even know it at the time. i'm so clever, aren't i?


	19. he wouldn't dream of being anywhere else

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **prompt:** at the edge  
>  master list of all prompts [here](http://ahumanintraining.tumblr.com/post/148079083612/the-princess-and-the-paladin).
> 
> for **[vanro-marand](vanro-marand.tumblr.com)** on tumblr; i hope this is as good as pancakes for you! thank you so much for your continual support of me!

At first, Shiro thinks he's dreaming of falling — until he realizes that he actually is.

And so with a hard thump and loud flurry of sheets, Shiro falls to the ground.

"Ah, fuck," he curses — albeit soft and under his breath. He clutches his back and groans as he gets back up on his two feet, untangling himself from the blankets and throwing off the couple of pillows that have fallen off the mattress along with him.

Allura immediately awakens, peering over the bed. "Oh, quiznak!" she gasps. "Are you alright, Shiro? What happened?"

He teeters to stand straight. "Oh no, it's nothing," he replies, flashing her a smile. "I just fell off the bed."

She reaches a hand down to help him up, her eyebrows furrowed with concern.

"What happened?" she asks urgently. "Bad dream?"

"No, no," he insists. "It was nothing."

Shiro drops the fallen sheets back onto the mattress, propping the pillows back to the head of the bed. He slips himself between the blankets again, and Allura receives him into her arms, snuggling in close to him, her nose nuzzling his chest.

He can't help the grin on his lips as he listens to her breath slowing and shallowing — until all her muscles relax and she is back asleep again.

He can't help the grin from widening as he feels her legs stretching out, the soles of her feet progressively pushing his shins away. She rolls her body forward, attempting to get closer to his warmth, her head butting against his chest. Her arms reach for him, and she unconsciously shoves him further and further back until —

once again, he's at the edge of the bed.

Half of his body teeters of the mattress, and he's using almost all of his core muscles to keep him balanced on the small strip of bed that she's allowed him. His right hand is still draped around her waist, using her body weight as only the tiniest bit of support to keep him atop the mattress as he's careful not to grip her too hard.

If there's one thing that Shiro learned about Allura, it's that she takes up a lot of space.

And as much of a pusher she is when asleep, he thinks he's adorable that she's just always trying to push himself closer to him — slowly inch by inch, as if she's trying to get closer even when she's skin-on-skin.

So he really can't complain.

Because even pushed up at the very edge of her bed, he wouldn't dream of sleeping anywhere else except beside her.

(And at any rate, he usually waits until the very right moment to slip out of her arms to transfer himself over to the other side of the actually very open bed anyway.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> also i just wanted to give everyone a big round of thank yous for reading this drabble series! there is so much love and encouragement i get from all of you and it means so much to me! _you_ are what keeps me writing, just please remember that. and the number of comments i get from these updates... T_T
> 
> i seriously couldn't have asked for anything more. thank you so much. <3


	20. he bemoans being the only responsible adult

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **prompt:** breaking the rules  
>  master list of all prompts [here](http://ahumanintraining.tumblr.com/post/148079083612/the-princess-and-the-paladin).

Coran ran a tight ship — and as the most responsible adult of the entire castle-ship — he made sure that everyone was in tip top shape and that every single operation in the Castle of Lions was clean and efficient, and that most of all there was no goofing off.

It was hard enough already keeping Lance at bay, especially when it came to teasing Keith — because for some reason that boy just always loved to test the boundaries of his fellow co-Paladin aggravation — and Pidge's rebelliousness was no joke to laugh about, but Coran was starting to have a growing suspicion that Shiro was no angel either.

And as much as Shiro was the exemplar leader of the Paladins: a good hard worker that trained from day to night, finished all the food on his plate without a complaint, and saying please and thank you like he actually came from a planet that had customs and manners — Coran also began to notice a playful smile hanging on Shiro's lip — especially when the princess was around.

Every now and then, Shiro would say a little something that Coran found a little off or made a joke referencing that Coran had no idea about at all — but regardless, that something would make Allura laugh without fail. Either Coran was too old to understand — he's tried asking them what was so funny before, without much luck — or there was something Coran didn't know about.

And at least to Coran, that something was that maybe Shiro getting a little closer to Allura than he would like.

Coran especially did not like how Allura seemed to know much more about the Black Paladin than she really should have known — like what spots on his body he liked to be massaged at, the fact that he mumbles nonsense in his sleep, or what shampoo and soap he used on a daily basis...

This was most certainly suspicious.

And not to mention that Coran had a strong feeling that when the lights were turned off, after the designated bed time, Shiro and Allura were up to no good. Allura was always a troublemaker to begin with, and Coran was worried that either she was rubbing off on Shiro, or that they were rubbing off of each other, or worst of all, that they were rubbing _on_ each other —

Coran's tried investigating too. Sometimes he checked down the hallway shortly after he called lights out to see if Shiro or Allura came creeping out into the hallway to join the other in their bedroom, but he was just never able to catch either of them in the act.

And worst of all, it seemed like everyone else was in on it. Coran swore that sometimes Pidge teased Shiro, and that other times, Hunk made faces at Allura — and often when Coran suddenly entered a room, there was a dead silence that made him think there was a lot being said that they didn't want him hearing.

But they weren't clever.

If they actually thought that Coran didn't suspect that any of this foolishness was happening right under his nose... well, then they were just naive because Coran was old and wise enough to know hanky panky in his own house.

"So!" he asked, looking around the breakfast table. "Did you all have a good sleep last night?" He uses a fork and knife to cut apart his morning gloop, anticipating the Paladins' answers.

"Yeah, I wish I got more sleep," Pidge replied curtly, and the other three generally agreed, grumbling under their breath.

There were only four Paladins on time this morning.

It was not a surprise to Coran that the other two were late.

And then speak of the devil, with a rush of feet and shushed laughter, the Black Paladin and his princess arrive, quickly and quietly taking their seats across from each other — not failing to give each other a cheeky grin.

Coran decided to take this opportune time to interject.

"So!" he asked, folding his hands together. "How was sleep for the two of you?"

"It was great. I rested very well," Shiro replied, not unlike any other time in the past.

"Me too," Allura agreed.

But at least to Coran, their tired eyes and loud yawns that morning around the breakfast table were a dead giveaway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lol yeah this one was different from the ones in the past, and i guess somewhat a different kind of characterization. not sure exactly what possessed me to write this, but hopefully you found this humorous?


	21. it's time to give her the talk

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **prompt:** good riddance  
>  master list of all prompts [here](http://ahumanintraining.tumblr.com/post/148079083612/the-princess-and-the-paladin).

Allura has known Coran for long enough to know when he is keeping something from her.

Coran has been acting weird around her lately — occasionally opening his mouth every now and then as if he wants to say something, but always holding back — so one day she decides to just approach him about whatever it is that might be on the older Altean’s mind.

“Coran,” she calls out to him, before the older Altean walks away yet again.

“Yes, dear?” he says, turning around, as if suddenly caught.

She narrows her eyes. “Is there something that you want to talk to me about?”

Coran gives her a funny look. “Not in particular, no. It’s not important. I’m sure you’re mature enough —”

Her eyebrow raises. “Mature enough for what?”

When Coran gets visibly flustered, Allura knows that she’s on the right track.

“Oh, nothing at all! Nothing!” he sputters, waving his hands before him. “I was just thinking to myself —”

“Coran,” Allura interrupts, with a cool smile, taking a step toward him. “If you think I’m mature enough, then _surely_ you should be able to discuss it with me now, whatever it may be.”

Realizing that there isn’t a way out of this, Coran sighs in defeat and spills his beans.

“Well…” he slowly explains, almost nervously. “I just felt the responsibility to tell you that you should make sure that you’re happy and that I will support you no matter what. So if you feel the need to talk to me about anything — really, _anything_ — feel free to indulge me.”

Allura blinks. She tries to read the older Altean’s eyes, but she can’t really make out what’s behind his eyes.

“ _Anything_ ,” he repeats emphatically.

Her eyebrows furrow. “What are you talking about?”

“Well, nothing too drastic, just something like — you know, a _relationship_ , my dear,” Coran clarifies, letting out his answer in a long huff.

“Oh,” Allura says, as things start to click in her head. “Oh. Yes. I very well know the importance of all the relationships that I’ve made so far. All the Paladins are my very good friends, and I will be sure to tell you if anything goes awry.” She hurries to finish up the conversation. “I really appreciate you reminding me that you’ll always be there for me. It means a lot to me.”

And now, Coran is unimpressed by her answer.

He leans in. “I don’t quite mean your _friends_ ,” he says, narrowing his eyes a little more accusingly. “I mean a _particular_ person that has gotten a lot more _particularly_ close to you.”

She forces a laugh, scoffing. “I wouldn’t have a clue who you’re talking about.”

“ _Shiro_ , my dear,” Coran says, much more pressing this time.

Allura tries to keep her eyemarks from brightening in too much of a telltale way. She covers one of her cheeks with a hand as casually as possible.

“Shiro?” she asks, innocuously. She pauses for a moment, acting like she is thinking for a little bit before explaining further. “I mean certainly Shiro is a very admirable man and he is very caring and kind, and I feel that I can trust him with some of my deepest secrets. He is absolutely someone that I am glad to have as part of my team.”

“No, no, not Shiro as part of the team. Shiro and you.”

“What about Shiro and me?”

“Oh _good riddance_ ,” Coran says, with a great roll of his eyes. “Every single person in this castle-ship knows that you two are… well, to put it best — _entertaining_ each other.”

Allura tilts her head in questioning shock. “What?”

Coran puts one hand over his face, groaning. “Please don’t try to deny this further, princess.”

She stutters. “I —”

She can’t believe it. She thought she’d taken every single precaution to keep her relationship with the Black Paladin completely on the down low — and yet apparently everyone knows.

And honestly she couldn’t fathom how — not when she’s been so careful about sneaking out of her room at night, not when she makes extra-sure no one is looking when she joined Shiro in the observatory, not when she would only lean back into his arms to watch the stars and the comets and the planets roll by when everyone else in the castle-ship is dead asleep.

She couldn’t figure out who could have _possibly_ spilled the beans — but then she does remember that one time when…

“Lance,” she hisses, under her breath, realizing.

“What was that?” Coran asked, leaning in.

“Oh, nothing,” she says, gears in her mind ticking. “I was just thinking about some others that I thought you might need to give _the talk_ to.”

Coran’s eyebrow raise. “I didn’t realize that…” and then his eyes gleam. “Who is it?”

She’s known Coran long enough to know that the older Altean can’t just let gossip go like that, so she takes advantage of his curiosity for a little bit.

“Lance…” she says, enunciating so that she ensures that Coran gets it the first time. “…and Keith are also… _entertaining_ each other.”

For some reason, Coran doesn’t look impressed.

“I know everything that goes on in this ship,” he says. “Don’t think that you can try to distract me from the real issue here by just making up relationships right now.”

“No, no!” she exclaims. “I swear! They are most _definitely_ entertaining each other.”

Coran shakes his head. “Don’t try to slip out of this, Allura.”

And then as the older Altean steps forward to give Allura a lecture, she sees

Lance peeking into the room from behind the door — the widest and sneakiest grin on his face.

She mouths a curse to the Earthling.

“ _Quiznak_.”


	22. she never could lie to him after all

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **prompt:** books  
>  master list of all prompts [here](http://ahumanintraining.tumblr.com/post/148079083612/the-princess-and-the-paladin).
> 
>  **for** [shiroallura](http://shiroallura.tumblr.com), with great thanks for making the "[12 days of shallura](http://shallurafanfiction.tumblr.com/post/154044708478/shallurafanfiction-hey-there-fellow)" edit for us!

“Tell me about Altea,” he asks her.

He says this, his voice so gentle and barely a whisper, with his eyes so genuine and focused on her that she has no choice but to promise him she would tell him everything she remembered and then some.

And so she takes him to the library — where she spends all of her free time just sitting and reading quietly to herself, reminding herself of all the stories and the great legends and the histories of her planet.

The library is a relic from her father’s time. It took her longer than it should have for her to realize at the end of the day it was good that her father prioritized education above all, because otherwise all of these books and writings and scriptures from Altea would be gone and there would be nothing else left from Altea but her fading memory.

In this library in the Castle of Lions, everything would be kept safe. And at least to Allura, this place is a sanctuary, one of the most — if not the _most_ important place — in the Castle.

She comes to visit the library every day. She comes when she wants to take a break from the mental calculations voyaging through the universe, when she wants to step out of noisy training rooms and frustrating battle planning, when she just simply needs some quiet time, when she misses Altea and even more when she misses her father.

It’s her safe space. It’s her _home_ — but she trusts Shiro to come in with her, and with him standing at her side, she slowly pushes the door open. She lets him enter to this place that she’s kept private from everyone else, and she lets him step foot in her own world of nostalgia. After all, she’s told him everything that she’s known about Altea — and he’s been such a good learner, _such_ a good listener, all this time…

He’s starstruck the moment he sees the aisles and aisles, stacks and stacks of books.

“Amazing,” he murmurs, under his breath.

She sees his bright eyes through the corner of his eyes, and she can’t help but feel warm from the fact that he’s treasuring this trove of literature as much as she does. Her heart swells and the unmistakable feeling of pride fills her chest.

She exhales and then walks through the shelves, not knowing what else to do. She runs her fingers along the spines of the books, sifting through the titles.

He follows behind her, his eyes still wide-open as he looks over everything. She’s fairly certain that he can’t read a single character of Altean, but she thinks about sitting with him in one of the quiet corners of the library and reading to him and sharing her culture with him. She thinks of him being fascinated by Altea, by _her_ — and she quickly tucks her imagination away, admitting to herself that she gets a little flushed just envisioning him in Altean clothing or him whispering in Altean to her…

“You know,” he says, his voice interrupting her thoughts. “I’m actually a little surprised that for as technologically advanced Altean culture is, you still have books.”

“Oh,” she replies, swiveling around to face him, immediately understanding. “You’re right. Paper was phased out a long time ago. The only reason why the Castle of Lions has all of these books because my father felt it was important to keep a remnant of our history.” She waves her hand across the air. “We have all kinds of books, from all different subjects. It’s truly a marvel.”

“It truly is,” he murmurs.

His gaze shifts toward a book on a nearby table — and her heart stops when she realizes that it’s _that book,_ the one that she’s bookmarked and has been working her way through —

He’s picked it up before she can say a word.

“What about this one?” he tells her, looking over the title. “Looks like you’ve been deep into reading it,” he says, flipping through the thin pages, careful not to let the bookmark slip out.

—and thank goodness that he can’t read Altean — because otherwise she’d have to explain why exactly she’s reading such a cheesy romance novel…

“Oh,” she says, trying to brush off the question as casually as possible. “It’s just a brief history of Althylups.” And when he gives her a quizzical look, she further explains, “Just one of the ancient civilizations of Altea.”

She hopes that her nervous voice isn’t giving her away.

“Ancient civilizations, huh?” he muses, looking pensively at the book before he looks back up at her. “I didn’t realize you liked history.”

“I..I do,” she replies quickly, hoping that he would move away from the topic — if anything, put the damn book down.

He closes the book and looks at the cover for a while.

“I was a history major,” he says suddenly.

“Major?”

“Yeah,” he explains. “In college or in higher education, we chose to specialize in topic, and I chose history. I ended up writing more papers than I would like, but I loved my research enough to get through everything.”

He pauses for a bit, but then continues. “World War II was my niche topic — naturally, I guess — because I was interested in the internment camps...” He trails off, a little lost in thought, still staring at the book in his hands.

“I see,” she responds. “I didn’t have those in Altea. I had to learn everything.”

“I suppose that’s another way that Altea is better than Earth,” he jokes. “Your educational system must have been much more comprehensive.”

“Oh, no,” she clarifies. “I was the princess. I had to learn everything. I had to be aware of every kind of perspective that there was.” She trails off, a nostalgic smile on her lips. “There was plenty of studying that came with the crown.”

He smiles. “No wonder you’re so intelligent.”

His eyes are dark and intense and she looks down briefly to keep herself composed.

“Well,” she tells him. “I used to hate it so much. But I have to thank my father for pushing a good education on me.”

He keeps his eyes on her for a while, empathetic, before he turns his attention back to the book.

“So Althylups, huh?”

She’s almost forgotten her cover up: Athylups was definitely something she pulled from out of nowhere out of desperation.

“Y-yes,” she affirms nevertheless.

He looks up at her. “Tell me about them.”

And when could she ever really say no to him?

She takes a seat on the floor, beckoning him to sit next to her. They lean their backs against the wall, and Allura ignores the fact that their shoulders are touching and that his head is somewhat leaned in toward her.

The distance is almost too much for her mind to handle, so when she opens the Althylups-history-book-actually-romance-novel to a random page, she makes sure to rest the book at an equal distance between the two of them. She hesitantly balances the spine of the book between their legs — but the book won’t stay put, and when he suddenly shifts his thigh against hers to hold the book in place, he doesn’t have the slightest idea that Allura’s heart skipped a beat.

She calms herself down and she ignores the actual words in the book, channeling the most of her memory about the Althylups that she can remember.

She tells him about how they invented the globerator and about how they developed the first method of energy-drawing from Balmerans crystals and about how even if their methods have long since been replaced by more efficient techniques, their traditions of giving thanks back to the Balmerans were still carried on.

“Actually, these traditions are _still_ carried on,” she corrects herself for her use of past tense. “For as long as I am around, giving back to the Balmerans will _always_ happen.”

“And it will,” he tells her suddenly.

She pauses and looks up at him. He gives her a reassuring smile, and for a tick she feels a growing sense of hope.

And it’s a rare feeling, being heiress of the better half of the universe and all.

“Yes,” she agrees, returning the smile. “It will.”

They exchange quiet confidence, and then she turns back to the history of Althylups. She goes on tangents and detours in her storytelling but he listens attentively as he always does.

He asks questions and she answers them, and he’s hungry to learn and she appreciates him so much for wanting to talk about Altea as much as she wants to talk about it, and for every minute he spends with her, she’s more and more affirmed that he cares about Altea as much as she does.

He hesitates.

“Allura…” he starts. “Could I ask you something?”

He asks the question so softly, so _cautiously_ , that her imagination starts to tease her.

“A-Anything, Shiro.”

She doesn’t know what his question is, or how he’s going to ask it, but she can feel the word “ _yes_ ” already loaded on the tip of her tongue.

“Do you mind teaching me a little bit of Altean?” he asks, almost shyly. “I guess… I guess a side hobby of mine has always been learning languages.” He stumbles over his words, reading her face. “I mean — of course I’m sure Altean is very different from anything I’ve ever learned before —“

She laughs. “Of course.”

She thinks why _not_ , there’s no reason she would ever hold back, but then —

His eyes look over at the page of the Althylups-actually-romance book, and she immediately recognizes _this particular part_ of the book. This scene is the one where —

“So…how does Altean work?”

“Ah, well…” she explains. “Each character is a sound.”

He nods. “I suppose that’s not too much of a difference from a lot of languages on Earth,” he says.

And then he points his finger at a character.

“What’s the sound associated with this character?”

She definitely stutters.

“ _Ith…_ ” she replies.

He looks at her. “And do you read left to right?”

She nods slowly.

And so his finger moves along the line.

“ _A….mo…..ra_.” She says, following after his finger.

“So… _ithamora_ ,” he repeats after her, reading the four characters through.

He looks up at her with earnest eyes.

“So…what does that mean?” he asks her. “Is that…is that even a word yet?”

She can’t take it anymore.

“A-Actually,” she blurts, trying her best to explain. “This isn’t a book on Althylups.”

He blinks, but doesn’t look away. “What do you mean?”

“It’s actually…” she pauses. “This book is actually my favorite novel.”

He laughs softly, leaning back against the wall. “I see.”

“N-Not that I was lying to you on purpose — I just felt embarrassed,” she quickly explains.

He just returns a smile. “I don’t mind,” he says. “I guess I _did_ just pick up this book up from the table without asking you first.”

“Sorry,” she apologizes. “I should have told you the truth in the first place.”

He shrugs, closing the book and setting it aside.

“Your secret is safe with me,” he promises her. “I won’t tell anyone that you keep yourself in here secretly reading romance novels and not actually recapping yourself on ancient Altean history.”

She chokes on a laugh, still a little embarrassed.

A beat.

“So…” he says, after a while, pensive. “What did I read then?”

She almost hiccups. “What do you mean?”

“ _Ithamora_ ,” he says, turning his eyes to hers. “What does _ithamora_ mean?”

She holds her breath, lips shaking. She’s never felt her heart this nervous before.

She can’t lie to him, so she decides to say it as normally and as casually as possible — not as though she cared, and not as though it mattered.

“ _Ithamora_ means I love you,” she says quickly.

“I love you?” he repeats.

She nods slowly.

He leans in. His eyes drift to her lips.

“And is that the truth?” he asks softly.

She smiles. She never could lie to him after all.

She leans in. “Yes.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> god this was so much longer than it needed to be


	23. he catches her when she falls

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **prompt:** weight of the world  
>  master list of all prompts [here](http://ahumanintraining.tumblr.com/post/148079083612/the-princess-and-the-paladin).
> 
> i’ve been on writer’s block since the beginning of this year, with apologies. this is my warm up.

She’s strong — capable of making sense of the universe even after being frozen for practically a millennia, capable of fighting off Galrans with her own bare hands, capable of healing an entire planet with a simple prayer, capable of keeping a clear mind to pilot a castle and guide its crew despite grief’s distraction.

She’s strong enough to do almost anything she sets her heart to — except to hold herself up.

Sometimes she feels so heavy that the entire universe is crashing down on her.

On the surface, she flashes them a confident smile. Being heroes and saving all the galaxies and making new alliances across the solar systems while putting a stop to the tyrant Galrans can be fun, especially from inside mighty robot cats. After all, she can’t not be lighthearted about it all, because once the paladins see sights that they can’t unsee, they might lose hope. And the one thing she can’t have is them losing faith in their own abilities because honestly she doesn’t _have_ anyone else left.

Her people had seen many generations of Voltron come and go. None of the Defenders have ever been as short lived or as delicate as humans, who even with all of their intelligence and courage and internal might, can snap at the lightest touch.

She has to protect them from everything — most of all from her own secrets, and especially the ones that she thought ten-thousand years would allow her to bury and hide away in the ruins of Altea.

Her planet is long gone and her crown long destroyed. This palace once grounded on Altean soil now is unrooted and soaring through space without a location or a new home in sight. It’s been off the ground for a long time now, never to taste again the salts of the rich fertile Altean soil or the sour acrid raindrops cleaning the exterior of the castle. It dutifully carries all that is left of her planet, all the relics of history aboard.

Her home is long gone, but none of her responsibilities have faded.

If anything, they’ve grown heavier with the blood of her people, with the metal of the swords in their fight, with the words that they used when they rioted against the Galra, with the weight of their hope and rise to victory behind them, with the length of time the rest of the universe has been waiting for Voltron, with the _growing doubt that maybe the fall of Altea wasn’t at all just something of an evil dictator’s will._

She can’t afford to lose. This she realized a long time ago, not long after she cried for hours mourning her father’s death, a death that took her far too long to really convince herself actually happened.

She can’t afford to lose because if she does, she loses _everything_ , or at least the fact she _had_ anything to begin with in the first place.

And sometimes the thought of that — that she is nothing but the supposed princess of a supposed planet that created the supposedly most powerful weapon in the universe — guides her. Pushes her. _Forces_ her to keep fighting for the past and the future – anything but the present state of things.

And sometimes the weight of ensuring a liberated universe – among all the possibilities of the natural laws that limited and bounded every single creature and life form in this galaxy – is more than enough for her to carry.

Sometimes she pushes the Paladins too hard, and sometimes she expects too much to be done in one day, and sometimes she sets too high expectations for herself, and always, she never gets everything she wants to get done _done_.

She holds her tongue, braces a smile, continues to create mental to-do lists that keep her awake at night and keep her mind tired in the day.

There is no other way.

She wasn’t ready to take the crown from her father’s head to make decisions worth more than the pain of ten-thousand years, and she wasn’t ready to sit in a throne too high for her stalky legs and too wide for her small body and too grand for her young age. She didn’t ask for the responsibilities. She didn’t ask for the weight that she now finds on her shoulders.

But none of this is a burden. She refuses to believe that any of it is.

It’s just so damn _heavy_.

Sometimes she crumples. Sometimes she falls to the floor, completely frozen and breathless. She can’t cry, she can’t scream, she can’t do very much because she is so _tired_.

He catches her when she falls.

He wraps her within his arms and hold her tight up against him, whisper sweet things reminding her that she has more to her life than her responsibilities, that she is so much more than what she believes she’s failing to do, that she is Princess Allura of Altea, capable of doing whatever she sets her heart to, and that most of all –

he’ll hold her up.


	24. yes, we can

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **prompt:** my child  
>  master list of all prompts [here](http://ahumanintraining.tumblr.com/post/148079083612/the-princess-and-the-paladin).

Her father was always there for her when she needed him:

When she tripped over her own two feet in the middle of the castle, he was right there to reach down and catch her wrist before she fell face first to the floor. When she refused to eat any of the droopy purple “healthy” stuffs for dinner, he would just roll his eyes and plop her leftovers onto his plate, knowing that her stubbornness wasn’t going anywhere. When she saw a word for the first time and was too short to even morph into a height tall enough to reach the dictionary on the very top shelf, he would poke her on the forehead and explain not only what the word meant but also how to use it. When she couldn’t keep up with her studies, he would make sure to tuck her into bed if late at night he caught her asleep over her desk.

Her father was always there for her until he wasn’t.

His reassuring smile is gone, his voice telling her goodnight is gone, his overwhelming hugs are gone — everything is gone except the fading memories she holds onto so tight and the immeasurable legacy he left behind.

She was never ready to take on the responsibility.

She still isn’t.

She never _has_ been.

“Allura?” he asks when he sees her stumble into the control room. His eyebrows are furrowed, and he’s already making his way toward her before she takes another step forward.

“I was wrong,” she says softly.

She’s been telling herself this for the past month.

“I was wrong,” she repeats, as if she’s never said it aloud before, as she reaches for the dashboard. “I should have known better. I should have —“

“—no, stop blaming yourself,” he interrupts, taking her hand gently. He raises it and cradles it between his two hands. “Please.”

She looks at her hand in his, then briefly back up at him.

“I need to fix this,” she tells him. Then she slips her hand out of his grip.

He lets her go, but he looks on, concerned. He watches her scan her identity over the keyboard, and he watches her scroll through the map of the universe, reading the coordinates with her tired and glazed eyes. She stares into the empty screen with even blanker eyes for a moment, two, three — then he sees a tear drop down her right cheek.

“Oh, _Allura_ ,” he whispers, quickly pulling her into his chest, wrapping his arms around her.

“I don’t know what to do,” she whimpers into the fabric of his clothing. “I never have. I can’t trust myself. I don’t trust myself. I’ve made so many mistakes, and I can’t —“ Her words catch on the hard lump in her throat, and her entire body trembles.

“You know what to do,” he says. “I know you do.”

She shakes her head. “No,” she denies — and the pain that cracks her voice almost breaks him. “Everything was a mistake. This shouldn’t have happened. I should have known better.”

“You couldn’t have known,” he tells her, his voice growing weak.

“I couldn’t know but I shouldn’t have risked going to Creylon. I was so _blinded_ with optimistic and I was so so _stupid_.”

“Allura, you can’t blame yourself —”

“It’s _my_ fault —“

“Allura —“

“ _Coran is dead_ because of me, Shiro!” she reminds him, looking up at him with angry broken hurt eyes. Her lips quaver. “How is this _not_ my fault? I should have realized how unrealistic it was to head to the next planet without taking a break. It was too risky from the start. I was stupid. _So stupid_.”

His eyes widen, his breath catches, his heart stops — there’s a moment where he doesn’t know what to say and that he doesn’t know how to say that it’s okay because honest to god he _himself_ is still getting over the fact that Coran is _dead_ and he’s spent the latter half of his day himself thinking about what _he_ could have done to prevent it all from happening in the first place.

“I shouldn’t have done it,” she repeats, like a mantra. “I shouldn’t have done it.”

She crumples into him. He wipes a stray tear from his eye.

“Everyone’s dead…everyone’s dead,” she whimpers, into his chest. “It’s just me left…and that awful _witch_ and I’m probably just as bad as she is —“

“ _God no_ ,” he breathes, pulling her away from him to look straight into her eyes. He doesn’t care if she sees him crying about the same thing that he’s trying to comfort her about.

She sees his red-rimmed eyes, the streak of water on his cheek, the frown on his face — and she closes her eyes and lets the tears brim over.

They grieve together.

“He told me…” she sobs. “He called me _his child_. He thought I could be as great as my father but I let him down, and I let my father down, and I let all of Altea down. I should have never taken the crown. I don’t want the crown. I’m going to fail everyone. I can’t be the leader that everyone wants to me to be.”

“You don’t need to be anything,” he tells her, voice still shaky.

“I’m not capable of being anything anyway.”

“Yes, you _are_ ,” he tells her. He pushes the tears off his face and takes her shoulders in his hands. He’s resolute now, done with his tears now, because he knows that she needs him more than ever now.

He looks straight at her. “You’re _Allura_ , Princess of Altea and commander of Voltron,” he reminds her. “And _you’re_ going to save the universe. And if there’s anyone that can do it, it’s you.”

She looks back at him for a long moment before she nods her head and wipes her tears away.

She doesn’t need many words from him. Not when she can see in his eyes that he absolutely trusts her and believes in her.

“Okay,” she whispers, with another nod.

“Say it with me,” he tells her. “Say that you can do it.”

The sentence comes slow to her tongue, but after another moment, she nods. She takes a deep breath.

“I can do it,” she says.

“Yes,” he assures. “You can.”

“I can,” she repeats.

And this, she tells herself ever since.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lol finally posted this after it being in my drafts since november,,,,


	25. he likes the sunrise best

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **prompt:** sunlight  
>  master list of all prompts [here](http://ahumanintraining.tumblr.com/post/148079083612/the-princess-and-the-paladin).

He loves the stars, but he likes the sunrise best.

He used to wake up at ungodly hours of the morning just to see the sun rise, just to wave the stars goodbye. He would wait for night to shed its constellations for the clouds of day — first an intense gold line running over the ripening horizon, turning the black sky into a smear of indigo and purple wherever the teasing sunlight reached.

Then, the break of dawn — a flash of white and a flare of fire — the gray clouds turning silver, the yellow moon turning ivory, the stars burning out, and the entire sky resetting and becoming embers under the growing sun. Dark reds, ochre oranges, soft pinks streaking the heavens but with every second, the colors bleeding into each other, transforming into incalculable numbers of shades.

He wouldn’t dare blink. If he did even once, he would miss the moment entirely.

Every minute passed like rainwater slipping from between his fingers. He’d witness an entire palette of hues every second. He would count the colors but lose track of time, and before long he would find himself asleep to the warmth of the sunshine, then awake to the sound of his mother yelling at him from the window to get off the roof so that he could catch the bus to cadet academy.

He misses the sunlight. He knows Earth’s sun is just another star in the wide expanse, that there is nothing unique about the lonely yellow star in the middle of humanity’s solar system. He’s an explorer, and he’s witnessed the mornings and the nights of many other worlds. He knows there are plenty of stars, plenty of other suns, all with their own lights and colors and breathtaking sunrises, but he can’t help but miss the Sun.

He misses how it made the Earth green, the flowers bloom, the birds sing. He misses how it made the chilly mornings warm, the rainclouds silver, the terrible yesterday a better today. He misses it all.

In space, there isn’t much except space. In space, there’s the night sky, but no white clouds or blue skies. Space doesn’t turn scarlet, pink, or orange. Space is a never-ending night, a forever of black. And while space surrounds him with the starlight of distant suns but no matter how far he looks into the night, he can never pick out the light of his Sun.

Sleeping is still a problem. He still dreams of things he doesn’t want to remember, but if there’s anything harder than staying asleep, it’s waking up to eternal night and realizing there isn’t really a new day to wake up for.

Sometimes he awakens, sees the black sky, and thinks that everything was just a dream and that he is still in that cold dead prison. Sometimes he awakens, sees the black sky, and can’t tell if it’s only been an hour since he’s fallen asleep or if an entire year passed without him even knowing. Space doesn’t tell him when he is or where he is, and space doesn’t tell him yesterday is today or if today is tomorrow.

But it’s different now.

He doesn’t have the sun but he wakes up instead to the stars in her eyes.

“Good morning,” she tells him.

He feels her warm hands on his chest, and he feels her soft breath on his lips.

He closes his eyes as she kisses him gently, and when he opens his eyes to take in the morning, he sees her bright smile and he sees her glowing cheeks.

He thinks he can see the sunrise in her eyes.

And when she leans forward to tell him she loves him, he doesn't dare blink.


	26. show me where to begin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **prompt:** tactile  
>  master list of all prompts [here](http://ahumanintraining.tumblr.com/post/148079083612/the-princess-and-the-paladin).

_show me all the parts of you that you do not love so I know where to begin._

.

.

She likes touching him the most.

He lies in her bed shirtless — a worthy reward after a long day. His face is buried in her pillow, his arms tucked underneath the fluff, and the rest of him practically naked, half-in half-out of the blankets.

His skin looks enticing. Warm and soft, but firm and sculpted just underneath. Seemingly completely hairless, but she knows that if she looks close enough, she can see the almost-blond hairs that cover his skin and that if she hovers just above them, she can make goosebumps rise in the trails her fingers make over his body.

She thinks of this — and she thinks of how he feels under her kiss, how he smells as she breathes him in, how his groan vibrates over his skin when she bites him gently — and she breaks into a girlish smile, quickly drying herself off from her nighttime shower. She changes into a soft thin nightgown and she slips between the sheets, lying on her side. She rests her head on her hand, props herself up, and her free hand reaches over to him.

She traces his skin with only the tip of her fingers, drawing little indescribable patterns over his torso and over his back. She follows the lines of his scars and she follows the line up from the small of his back to the very base of his neck, between his broad shoulder blades.

It’s now that he stirs from his short descent into slumber, and he growls to threaten her out of tickling him.

She isn’t scared — even if she can feel the deep rumble just under her fingertips and even if she can feel the many small muscles of his back ripple under her palm. Instead, she laughs soundlessly, just with her breath, and she leans over and presses a soft kiss at exactly the place on his back where he’s given away that he’s most ticklish.

She doesn’t stop. She doesn’t stop when she gets to the top of his back. She doesn’t stop as she rounds the edge of his shoulder. She doesn’t stop as she trails down his arm, watching his muscles tense every other occasion by her feathery light fingers.

She doesn’t stop where his skin ends, where his metal begins.

She doesn’t hesitate as she moves from his smooth skin to his smooth metal. She follows the lines of his scar tissue melted into the creases of his metal. She follows the warmth of his flesh and bone to the heat of his joints and gears.

She isn’t scared — even if she can feel the latent humming just under her fingertips and even if she can feel the glowing purple gleam of his power under her palm.

She presses a soft kiss there all the same — at the place he’s apologized for having over and over again, at the place he feels the least worthy, at the place he feels least human.

She doesn’t care where his arm came from or why his arm got there, and she doesn’t care that it’s Galran or that she doesn’t know why exactly his arm sometimes makes her commanding dashboard flicker when he comes to close. She doesn’t care because he’s Shiro, no matter what he believes he is, and because she loves him for everything that he is and everything that he _is_.

She withdraws her lips from his arm, then leans in again to pepper the back of his neck with kisses. He smells like his skin and his soap and the little traces of hard work from earlier that day that he didn’t quite rub off his skin that well.

She bites down. Hard.

He flinches, then turns around, giving her a bemused smile:

“Is there a _particular_ reason you’re so touchy today?”

“Well, not in _particular_ ,” she teases, biting down on her lip. She inadvertently pushes her body into him, then drags his hand to the lower curve of her hip. Languidly, she leans in and kisses his lips.

He doesn’t push her away.

His hands paint over her skin. His right, hard and cold, and his left, warm and soft — they both make her shudder. She closes her eyes and doesn’t hide her widening smile, every now and then feeling the brush of his bangs over her when he brings his lips down to touch his lips to her skin. Down, down, down, until she can’t tell the difference between him and her anymore. Down, down, down, until her mouth turns dry and his name is perched on her lips.

Down, down, down, he’s gentle, caressing every inch of her in the same way she loves every inch of him.

She likes touching him the most —

but she most certainly doesn’t mind when he returns the favor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> bleghhh what did i just write
> 
> also someone needs to tell me where that quote came from because i've been looking around on the interwebs and apparently it's....anonymous?


	27. it doesn't bother him a single tick

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **prompt:** happy birthday  
>  master list of all prompts [here](http://ahumanintraining.tumblr.com/post/148079083612/the-princess-and-the-paladin).
> 
> lol i'll be honest, i hate this prompt and i hate what i wrote for this. i literally. i did not want to post this but. ugh. forgive me. it's not my best.

As the last few seconds to midnight pass, the Paladins sit back into the couches with content smiles on their faces after a well-spent day celebrating Hunk's birthday.

Hunk sighs, looking up at the ceiling. "Thank you, everyone," he says, then brings his eyes back down to his teammates. "Seriously — this might have been the best birthday I've ever had. I mean, it's not every day that your friends bring you to a cool new planet and take you asteroid surfing."

"Of course," Keith says softly, arms crossed but eyes gentle. "You deserve the best."

"And _I'll_ take the credit for discovering that planet in the first place," Lance interjects, kicking his legs back. "When I saw that rainbow waterfall, you know the first person I thought of was you, my man."

"Good thing I was able to build a proper surfboard in time, too," Pidge adds. "Otherwise that plan would have sunk."

"Yeah that waterfall was pretty awesome," Hunk replies to Lance, then turns to Pidge. "And I didn't expect surfing to be as fun as it is back on Earth." He smiles, thinking about the entire day all over again. "Thanks, everyone," he says once more, but then his eyebrows furrow. "You know something though? We've celebrated all of our birthdays but I don't think Allura's birthday ever came up yet, right?"

"True," Lance agrees, sitting up and looking over at Shiro. "When _is_ Allura's birthday?"

The other three paladins suddenly look over at him as well.

Shiro returns a strained smile. "Why would I know?"

"Do we _actually_ go over this again?" Pidge replies snidely. "Everyone already knows you two are totally in bed with each other."

Shiro furrows his eyebrows. "What?"

"Oh, come _on_ ," Lance says loudly, rolling his eyes. "He's never going to admit it."

"For real," Keith mutters.

"Whatever, leave him alone," Hunk drawls, shrugging the whole situation off. "Do you even know when Allura's birthday is?"

The other paladins look at him, expectantly.

But Shiro's already been jogging his memory — and he realizes that he's never actually asked the princess.

"...no," he admits.

And what a shame because he thought he would at least know when she was born before knowing what positions she liked best in bed.

.

.

When and however her birthday is celebrated, they decide, it has to be a surprise, and so after being assigned to find out when Allura's birthday is, Shiro goes right to his most trusted ally when it comes to everything he needs to know about Allura, but unfortunately for him, Coran is confused the moment Shiro asks.

“Birthday? What’s that?” Coran asks him, with a thoughtful twirl of his mustache.

Shiro isn’t sure if he is making a joke by feigning ignorance — mostly because the older Altean had quite a different taste in humor, not only because of his eccentrics but also having come from a completely different galaxy, not to mention being many thousand years apart — so he answers earnestly.

“The day someone was born,” Shiro clarifies. And then he pauses for a moment before he repeats. “I was just asking if you knew Allura’s birthday.”

Coran untangles his finger from his mustache and rests his chin in his hand, contemplative. “Well…it has been a long time since Allura was born.” He thinks a little more. “I’d bet she was born maybe about 700 million ticks ago.”

Shiro’s eyebrows knit together. “Well, not her actual birth date, but…” and he tries to reword, rubbing the back of his head. “What day of the year was she born?”

Coran looks at him funny. "Day of the year?"

Shiro slowly starts to put the pieces together, determining that maybe this is more than just a miscommunication. “...you don’t celebrate birthdays, do you?”

Coran's eyes narrow momentarily, but then they light up. Coran raises a finger to the ceiling, seeming to remember something. "Oh yes, I’ve heard that humans celebrate their birthdays on an annual basis as dictated by their solar year. Is this what you were talking about when you mentioned 'birthday?'"

The paladin sighs, nevertheless remaining patient. "Yes, Coran. Do you know Allura's birthday?"

Coran shakes his head vigorously back and forth. “Oh no, no, no, we don't celebrate this birthday thing in Altean culture. We live for much too many years for that kind of nonsense," he explains, with a wave of his hand. "But if anything, there is a great celebration for anyone that passes 500 million ticks, because that is when young adolescents are considered to have reached adulthood.”

Shiro tries to do some mental calculations, converting ticks to seconds, and then seconds to years, but he fails to multiply by 365. So he asks another question instead. “So what was the day in the Altean year when Allura reached 500 million ticks?"

Coran looks at him strangely again. “I don’t know," he replies. "Do the days repeat year after year?”

Befuddled, Shiro explains, "Well, yes. There's twelve months in a year and..." He watches Coran's eyes glaze over as he explains what he starts to realize are very trivial human measurements of time, and so changes course. “So how did you know when Allura was 500 million ticks old?”

This, Coran understands. “Oh!" he replies, as if it were obvious. "When her eye marks showed up, of course!"

Shiro leans forward, thinking that this might be where the answer is. "And do you know when that was?"

"Oh, I'd say about 200 million ticks ago."

"...I see."

It's around now that Shiro realizes if they were to celebrate Allura's birthday, they were going to have to make it happen.

.

.

Of course, preparing for a surprise birthday doesn't come as easy as they expect, and after about a month of pushing back "Allura's birthday" because of undue procrastination, the Paladins finally get everything into place.

Honestly, Shiro is surprised the princess still hasn’t noticed their increasingly odd behavior. Keith is terrible at keeping secrets, and Lance drops too many hints. Not to mention Shiro has been excusing himself from more of Allura's furtive make-out sessions than usual, with a soft lie of "needing to train with the rest of the team."

Even _Coran_ smelled something fishy, and if the older Altean was able to figure out that room in the basement was being used for something else aside from "storing Pidge's mini-robots," then surely the princess knew something was going on just under her nose — but the princess didn't seem to catch on, no matter how much Shiro suspected it himself.

Regardless _the day_ finally comes, and everyone unanimously agrees to assign Shiro to the job of getting the princess to the basement where her surprise party is set up because he's "totally in bed with her."

And so here Shiro is, waiting for just the right moment to catch the princess, and as he sees her turning the corner, he preps himself up to tell her the second biggest lie he’s ever told her in his life. (His first biggest lie to her was when he told her he didn't realize that he was in love with her until after she threw him across the room when they were escaping the Galrans — but of course, he was in love with her since day one.)

“Allura!” he calls out to her, sprinting to her. He twists his face into fake fear.

“Yes?” she says, turning around. She’s concerned once she sees his face. “What’s wrong?”

“The...” he starts to say but then upon seeing her intense eyes, he suddenly forgets his original lie. Fuck. “The mice!” he says, stalling a little bit.

“The mice?” Allura says. And then she looks down and concentrates.

Fuck, he forgot she can telepathically communicate with them.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

“Platt is vomiting," he blurts suddenly. "I think she might have eaten something bad.”

Allura pulls herself out of her head, furrowing her eyebrows. “Shiro, what are you talking about? The mice report to me that they're fine.”

He supposes he can't back out of his lie now, and so he keeps weaving more questionable details. “No, no," Shiro insists. "I swear Platt isn’t okay. I just spotted Platt lying prone downstairs."

Realizing he's not going to be able to keep this lie undercover for long, he takes her wrist and guides her downstairs with him before she has another chance to try to communicate with the mice.

“Shi-Shiro!” she protests.

He brings her all the way down to the lowermost level of the castle-ship, entering a dark room, without hesitation.

“Shiro, what are you — "

And then suddenly the lights go off, the balloons go flying everywhere, the firecrackers go off, a billion and a half noise blowers go off, and the entire castle-ship turns up in song.

“HAPPY BIRTHDAY!”

She almost hits Shiro as she swings around to defend herself from the confetti and the glitter. “What?! What is —”

Her face turns from confused to alarmed to surprised to concerned to downright angry.

And oh, she is _angry_. Frustrated and angry and betrayed. She looks to Coran.

“ _Birthday?_ What is this _birthday_ thing?” she demands.

Coran gives her a pitiful shrug. “They wanted to celebrate the day of your birth! I tried to tell them that Alteans don’t really do such a thing because we have so many, but they really wanted to do something for you.”

Her mouth opens and closes. Then she turns to Shiro.

“But I don’t understand — why was I never told about this?" she asks him.

He hesitates, not sure if the princess appreciated the entire set-up. "It was a surprise?" he explains. "Have you heard of surprise birthday parties?"

“Never,” she tells him.

“Well, you have _now_ ,” Lance suddenly interrupts, placing a flower crown on her head. “Happy birthday, Allura! What are you now, like 700 million ticks or something?”

She blinks. "Well, I —" she starts. "How did you know that?"

"Oh, because Shiro told us!" Pidge replies.

"Come on, Allura!" Lance exclaims. "We've got all sorts of surprises set up for you!"

The princess forces a laugh and nods, letting herself be taken away by the younger Paladins to do whatever birthday things they have planned for her, but not without shooting Shiro a glare.

.

.

He apologizes to her later, crawling into her bed.

“Hey,” he says, siding up next to her. “I’m sorry about today."

She turns around and snorts at him. He's surprised to see the smile on her face.

“I was more confused than anything else,” she says, furrowing her eyebrows. "I still don't understand the concept of celebrating a birthday."

He wrinkles his nose. "We're celebrating you," he explains. "That you're here and that we have you in our lives." He kisses her forehead. "That _I_ have you in my life."

She's quiet, so he looks at her for a moment, trying to read her eyes.

"I'm sorry," he apologizes again.

She shakes her head, revealing a smile. She laughs, then taps the tip of his nose with her finger. "No, no this was sweet for all of you to think of me," she clarifies. She hesitates a moment. "I was just surprised that you knew my exact age. I'm... old beyond Earthling comprehension, you know."

He looks her face up and down, from her eyes down to her lips and back up to her eyes. "Well, honestly, you don’t look a tick over 700 million,” he teases.

“Shut up,” she scolds him.

He kisses her and then asks, “Why don't you want me to know your age?”

“Because it's strange,” she admits. “Doesn’t it remind you that we’re aliens to each other? That…we’re kinda not compatible maybe?”

“What are you talking about?” he asks. “I couldn’t have asked for anything else. We were meant for each other. So what if we’re not from the same planet? I couldn’t care less.”

“Well…as long as 700 million ticks don’t bother you.”

He touches his forehead to hers. “They never will," he assures her.

She smiles. "Good," she tells him, looking him up and down. “Well, that being said, I also don’t appreciate not knowing what’s going on in my ship,” she warns, swinging her leg over his waist. “I _am_ the captain of this ship, after all."

He purrs into her neck. “I do rather enjoy when you're in control.”

She laughs, then meets his eyes to gives him a look. “So for this birthday thing..." she murmurs, eyes lowered. "...do I get presents?”

The smile on his lips grow as he feels her hands roam down his body.

"Anything your heart desires, Princess."


	28. a watched clock never moves

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **prompt:** waiting  
>  master list of all prompts [here](http://ahumanintraining.tumblr.com/post/148079083612/the-princess-and-the-paladin).
> 
> hello i'm not dead, i promise.

It feels like forever since he’s run his fingers through her silver hair — caught her face between his hands and pressed his lips to her mouth — and he knows it by how tight his trousers feel when he watches her walk down the grand staircase to meet the rest of the team at the base.

She’s beautiful. He already knew that; Allura’s water-blue eyes and earth-brown skin are his entire world, but now, dressed up in an elegant star-laced gown and decorated with crystal studs over her forehead and collarbones with the lightest touch of bronze highlighter at the edges of her cheeks, she takes his breath completely.

His muscles go slack and his jaw almost drops, but her arched eyebrow calls him to attention.

“Ready to meet the Empress, Paladins?” she hums to the Defenders, looking for the go in each of the Paladins’ eyes.

She lingers on Shiro’s gaze for a split second longer, her mouth curled into the most subtle smile — a warning to be very discreet and to not publicly show any affection — before she turns to Coran and asks for his discretion.

“You look glorious as always, love,” he tells her, taking her arm into his. “I’m sure Empress Auroka will be very impressed by how well we all have suited up for her ceremony tonight.”

Allura snorts. “I’m sure her expectations are set very low considering the rather rough landing that Voltron made for our first impression on her planet.”

She briefly looks back at the Paladins, and each of them look sheepishly down at their feet, reminded of their meteor-like crash earlier this morning on planet Fazzino . They had all come out of the wreckage looking quite toasted and crisp on the edges, and most certainly not looking like the very organized and very well-put-together Defenders that Allura had promised the Empress.

But that was an entire daytime ago, and now that the stars were out, the seven of them were fixed into the most handsome Altean clothing — and ready to present.

Making their way out of the Castle of Lions, they followed the well-lighted path leading to the Empress’ castle, the instrumental music and the chatter of the crowds from inside growing increasingly loud as they got closer. Shiro followed right behind Allura and Coran, and as Allura ascended the paved stairs up to the castle entrance, he could just barely make out the shadows of her legs against the warm amber light from the castle interior through the thin dress fabric.

Again, he feels that urge to reach forward and just pull her against him, fit his hands over her curves and his nose into the crook of her neck, but oh that would be so improper and not-at-all-appropriate just before they’re to present to the Empress of Fazzino.

In fact, Shiro knows he still has to wait many more hours until the end of the night before he can slip under the sheets with the princess, but he’s already exasperated by the whole ordeal and wants the evening to be over and done with.

He’s all stiff smiles and awkward small talk through the rest of the night. The Fazzinos are a talkative species — full of laughter and gossip — and any other day, Shiro wouldn’t have minded the least. Except that the last several times he’s tried to sneak in even the briefest moment with Allura, she’s caught in yet another conversation circle.

Shiro’s front is usually better during diplomatic events such as this one, but maybe it’s because he hasn’t had Allura to himself yet all day, or because she’s just looking so glorious tonight, or because the food and drink at the party aren’t satisfying his taste, but Shiro finds his mouth pouting more often than not and his eyes glaring at the clock as if the tick-hand should move four times as fast.

After crowdwatching for a while longer, he looks up at the center timepiece again, and is dismayed that only a few minutes have passed since he last checked the time. He sighs, crossing his arms, and turns toward the refreshment tables for what must have been the twenty-second time since arrival.

“And what are you looking so grumpy about tonight, my Paladin?” she asks from behind him.

He can’t help his eyes lighting up and his heart skipping a beat. He swivels around immediately.

“Hey,” he greets her, softly. He reaches for her hand.

She pulls her hand away. He groans.

“Aren’t you the one always teaching about how patience yields focus?” she teases, with a violet-glossed smirk.

He checks for any inquisitive eyes before he leans in and rests the palm of his hand just over the small of her back, pulling her in. “I can’t focus if you’ve been distracting me all night,” he replies into her ear, voice husky.

She bites her lip and inhales deeply, looking him up and down. “I’m sure you can keep it together for just another few hours,” she breathes out.

He gives her a cheeky grin. “You think too highly of me.”

She checks the crowd with a side glance before she ducks her head closer to him. “I’m not wearing any underwear,” she confesses, with an impish smile.

He exhales shakily out of pursed lips, momentarily remembering the silhouettes of her legs through her thin evening dress as they had gone up the stairs to the celebration earlier that night. Allura then giggles, excusing herself and chuckling some more as she slips back into the crowd.

Shiro’s eyes turn back to the unmoving clock.

Waiting never seemed more like an eternity.


	29. don't let me go

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **prompt:** fading away.  
>  chapter dedicated to [shalluravoltron](http://shalluravoltron.tumblr.com) on tumblr.

 

They only first realize the end is coming when suddenly Allura looks a little paler.

“You feeling sick or something?” Pidge asks Allura at the kitchen counter. Pidge watches her stir hucklejuice and fennycream into her morning drink. “You’re making tea.”

Allura scrunches her eyebrows. Her puzzled expression creates wrinkles over her eye marks. “I always make tea in the morning,” she defends, raising the mug to her lips as if to better prove her point. “And I feel perfectly fine.”

Pidge cocks her head to the left. “Oh, you just seem to have a little less color.”

Pidge takes her glasses off and wipes the lenses on her shirt before putting them back on to examine Allura again. She frowns and then shrugs. “Eh, it’s probably just the lighting,” she says, and then reaches behind her to get her own form of breakfast food — grotler and critgle, something akin to cereal and milk on Earth.

“Hm,” Allura frowns, setting aside the matter and returning to her beverage.

But Allura doesn’t cast off the paladin’s comment, and the words replay over and over in her head. She knows Pidge is astute and never opens her mouth too soon. Allura takes another sip of her tea while raising the back of her hand up to eye level, rocking it back and forth in the light.

And maybe Allura does see some kind of difference, because she slowly slips from the kitchen back to her room, taking her tea with her.

.

.

Coran knocks on the princess’s door about an hour later.

“Princess?” he calls.

“Just a minute, Coran,” says her voice from behind her door. He can tell by the sound of her muffled speech that she’s on the far side of her room, most likely in her bathroom. He rests his right forearm on the hallway wall and leans against it, waiting for her to open the door.

He hears the soft pattering of her slippers and then her room door slides open with a momentous whoosh that unsettles her earring. Her curly hair catches the end of the purple crystal.

“Pidge told me that you returned to your room promptly before finishing your tea,” Coran tells her, looking her up and down. He reaches forward to reset her earring back to a proper dangle off her ear. “Is something the matter, love?”

“I don’t know,” Allura admits, placing the palms of her hands to her cheeks. “Do you think I seem a little… off-color to you?” She looks down at her hands again. “I thought I might have just been imagining it after Pidge pointed it out, but I’m starting to believe it more and more.” She returns her eyes to Coran. “What do you think?”

“Maybe a little,” he replies. Then he adds, “I might be looking a little pale these days, myself.”

Some silence first. Then, Coran offers her a grim expression, meeting her eyes.

Allura doesn’t think this bodes well. “You know something, don’t you?”

She doesn’t need the answer, and he doesn’t give her one. She reads the older Altean’s stiff body language, and then takes a deep inhale and exhale. She stands aside her door.

“Come in,” she beckons him.

Then, he tells her everything he knows.

.

.

Her days now begin with a new routine, but as expected of any royal family member, Allura adapts quickly to new situations with grace.

Not a single person has clue she spends an additional fifteen minutes every morning to add lustermoch powder to her face and neck, to brush some of it onto her hands and arms.

Today, however, she needs an extra five.

Her skin is more jaundiced than last week, and not even a healthy layer of the browning lustermoch can fix it. She needs a little more today, and as she dabs the powder smoothly under her eyes, she notices that now even her eyes are growing fainter.

And this isn’t something that Altean make-up can fix. In fact, it never solved anything, just covered up what’s going on behind her calm façade.

She knows she can’t keep hiding the truth — but she still can’t meet anyone in the eyes.

She commands with her back to the Paladins and she keeps her sights plastered onto the space night sky through the castle-ship’s windows. She talks toward the ground and she avoids direct light.

And most of all, she never _never_ remained alone in the same room as Shiro. Because she knows better than anyone else that she’s avoiding the conversation she dreads the most.

.

.

The conversation happens anyway.

She knows it is once she feels him catch her fingers after a team debrief. She thinks she should have left the room sooner so that it wasn’t just Shiro and herself for an additional two ticks, but then she also thinks that maybe her legs didn’t move earlier because even her own body knew that she had to face the situation at hand.

“Allura,” he says softly.

He only uses her name on matters between them. Today, he probably wants to know why she’s been evading him for the past few weeks.

“What’s been going on?”

Still, the question strikes her, and she is caught unprepared.

“What do you mean?” she replies. She gently takes her hand back from him, folding her arms into each other. She sees him try to meet her eyes but she doesn’t let it happen.

“I…” He starts his sentence but can’t finish it the way he wants to. He starts again. “I can’t help but feel like you’ve been distancing yourself from me. From everyone, really.”

She opens her mouth, but closes it again when she feels a hard lump in her throat.

He steps closer. “You know you can tell me anything,” he assures her. He tries to look into her eyes again, tries to rest his hands on her shoulders, but she slinks away from his touch. “Allura.” He takes a deep breath as he withdraws. “We’re close, aren’t we?”

Too close, really, she replies in her head. She knew she should never have let herself believe for a moment that anything more could come out of their interactions, or that anything could have lasted for as long as she wished.

All those times she laughed at his lame jokes until far too late to give them sufficient sleep, all those times she took him up to the star observatory to watch the passing galaxies, all those times she clung to his embraces for far longer than she should have, waiting for him to maybe, just _maybe,_ bring her lips up to a kiss…

They never crossed that line. And maybe that was better they never did because —

“I’m disappearing, Shiro,” she blurts suddenly. Then, like an opened bottle, she starts spilling. “Fading away. I’m going to be gone soon and you can’t see it but one day this make-up isn’t going to cover it up and I’m just becoming a ghost and —“

“Wait, wait, wait,” he interrupts her, reaching for her again. Her words turn into bawls now, and she takes refuge in his arms without fight. “What are you talking about?”

“ _This_ ,” she explains, using a forming tear at the corner of her eye to wipe off a streak of the lustermoch from her cheek. She raises her powdered fingertip to his eyes. “I’m _disappearing_ ,” she repeats.

“What? Why?”

He doesn’t have a clue, she realizes, as she watches his eyebrows furrow with deep concern, his eyes widen with surprise. She’s done too good of a job keeping him in the dark. Maybe she regrets it now when there’s only so much time left between them.

“Does Coran know about this?”

She nods her head. “Coran’s disappearing too,” she says.

“Why?” he asks again.

She forces smile and shrugs. “I don’t really know. Coran doesn’t either, but he thinks this is something to expect after being preserved in a cryopod for ten thousand years,” she tells him. “The cryopod, it seems, can’t hold anyone’s life intact after a certain amount of time. And after more than a century, it just saves their quintessence, and quintessence only has so long of a half-life, you know.”

The silence hangs between them for a while, and she lets it soften a moment more.

“That’s why I’m disappearing,” she says. She blinks and she feels a set of tears roll down her cheeks. “That’s why I don’t want anyone to notice.”

She looks at him to guess at what he might be thinking, but for the first time, his expression is unreadable. His eyes are dark and his lips are taut, and she doesn’t know what to make of it.

“Do the others know?” he asks, slowly.

She shakes her head. “Coran hasn’t told anyone,” she replies. “And I’ve only told you.”

“Jesus, Allura,” he suddenly says. He holds her tighter, and she can feel his breath shake. “Fuck.”

She blinks, her mind blank. The last time Shiro slipped into colloquial was after seeing her emerge alive after witnessing the entire castle-ship pummeled by one destructive blow from Zarkon.

“Why didn’t you tell us earlier?” he asks, in a harsh and breathy exhale. “Why did you tell _me_ earlier?”

“I… I don’t know. I was scared. I didn’t want to believe it.”

She feels him take a few more breaths before he pulls away to look at her face again. This time, she meets his eyes properly, and he sees how light her eyes are, and he sees the color of her silver hair is dull, and he sees the make-up caking over her skin, and he sees how the shimmer of her eye marks aren’t as luminescent as he remembers.

He draws the back of his finger over the streak on her cheek she’s wiped the lustermoch off, studying just how much of her is left — rather, still there.

“You’re going to have to tell everyone else,” he murmurs. His fingers trail past her ear now, tucking her graying hair behind it.

“I know,” she says. “I… I wanted to tell you first, I guess.”

He nods. She notices his eyes are glassy.

“It’s okay though,” she reasons slowly. “I think perhaps that this is all I was ever meant to do.”

“What do you mean?”

She continues, slowly but surely. “That I was just supposed to make sure Voltron formed again, and that you became a team ready to defend the Universe.”

“Right,” he says, nodding again. He loosens his embrace around her, only keeping his hands on her upper arms. She sees him bite his lip, taking a deep breath. “Right, right — _fuck_.”

“…Shiro?” She watches him wrestle with his thoughts.

“Allura,” he tells her suddenly with a strong voice. His dark brown eyes snap up to hers. Intense. “Allura, this can’t be it.”

She shakes her head. “It is,” she says. Maybe her voice cracks. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

“No, no,” he edits himself. “I mean, you can’t think like that — that this is all you ever were. A messenger? A piece in the puzzle? You aren’t. You’re more than that.”

His words are reassuring but she finds them just easier pills to swallow. She frowns. “You don’t have to try to make me feel better,” she says. “I’ve already accepted the truth, and Coran and I have done what we’ve needed to do. The Paladins are fine now on their own. The Universe will be —“

“No,” he interrupts her. His hands squeeze her arms. “This isn’t fair, Allura. This isn’t fair to you or Coran.”

This isn’t fair to _me_ , is what he’s saying. He doesn’t say it out loud but his thoughts are clear and vibrant for her to hear.

If they had known their time was limited, would they have gone past shared laughter and late nights and warm hugs? Would they have been more compelled to tell each other how far they felt for each other? Would their patience for unsaid confessions withered faster knowing they only had so many more moments together?

“The Universe isn’t known to play fair,” she mumbles under her breath, looking down.

He doesn’t seem to have a response for that. He just pulls her into his arms again, wrapping her into a long embrace. She clutches him too, placing her cheek against his chest and feeling how warm his skin is and how steady his heart beats.

And they just breathe. One. Two. Three. Together.

“Do you know how much longer you have?” he asks her.

It takes her a while to answer, mostly because she wonders if a lie with certainty is better than truth with uncertainty. “No,” she finally says, however.

“Okay,” he replies. She feels him shift a little, then she feels his fingers tuck under her chin. He lifts her face up to meet her eyes. “Then let’s not waste any more time,” he says.

She feels his breath on her jaw and his warmth wafting from his skin. His lips are hanging… hanging just inches from her and she knows that if she just _leans in_ she can be kissing him — but she doesn’t look down at his mouth and her eyes don’t leave his because she knows with how little future she has, the present she has is so much more important than anything that can or could have been.

And maybe it’s better this way, she thinks. Because perhaps if they knew the end was coming right from the beginning, they might have been too scared to grow this close at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hahahhaha


	30. done deal

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **prompt:** all i ask  
>  just a quick drabble to celebrate the end of 2017!

Allura’s hand is only halfway into the cookie jar when her cover is blown.

“Oh, so _this_ is what’s been getting into the snacks these past couple of weeks,” a voice says behind her, as she feels an arm wrap around her, pulling her into a warm body. “A sneaky Altean princess.”

She falls into the backward embrace, leaning against the familiar warmth. “Didn’t expect _you_ to still be awake, Shiro,” she replies, re-lidding the cookie jar and joining her hands with his at her waist. She tilts her head up and to the side, taking in the smell of his freshly showered skin and minty toothpaste breath. “Don’t you have an early morning tomorrow with Coran? You should be fast asleep.”

“Don’t try to turn this around on me,” he laughs softly, nuzzling under her jaw with his nose. “I had a few things left to get done before bed and happened to see the kitchen light on.” He raises his head and looks at her. “And you? What’s your excuse for being caught cookie-handed?”

“Hunk’s a really good baker,” she answers without hesitation. “I can’t help but eat my fill of his delectable treats.”

“So, should I have to inform the others that you’re the source of their diminishing supply of sweets?” Shiro half-teases, half-threatens. “I’m sure they’ll be very happy to know the culprit of their case of missing baked goods.”

“Mm, no, no, no,” she chuckles, whirling around and placing a single finger over his lips. She drapes her free arm over his shoulder and leans in. “This discovery of yours needs to stay between you and me.”

“And what’s the benefit in that?” he asks, kissing her finger and turning his lips into her palm. “I’d rather not be dragged in to mediate every other conflict that breaks out about who stole the cookies from the cookie jar.”

She grins, lightly tapping his nose. “Hm. Well, I have just the proposition for you, my Paladin.”

“Are you bribing me, Princess?”

“An offer,” she rewords, combing back a fallen bang over his forehead with her fingers. “A passionate kiss now, an amazing back massage later, and an _incredible_ night afterwards. And all I ask…” she says, lowering her voice. “…is that you forget you witnessed my late night cravings.”

“Hm,” he hums, considering. “And what if I say no?”

She bites her lip. “Don’t.”

“Mm, I don’t know,” Shiro drawls. “This is all very tempting but as you reminded me, I do have to be awake very early tomorrow morning.”

She smirks. “Oh, I guarantee you won’t take very long.”

“You think so? That’s a hard promise to keep,” he replies slowly, sliding his hands past her waist over the backs of her thighs. He gently squeezes her muscles between his thumb and fingers, as he steps closer to her.

She feels the edge of the kitchen counter behind her press into the small of her back and the rumble of his voice in her chest. She places her hands on his chest and lightly pushes him away — although he doesn’t give. “Well, I _did_ offer an incredible night,” she reminds him.

“Right,” he says in a low growl, before suddenly lifting and sitting her up onto the counter. He bends forward, ducking his head to graze his lips up the side of her neck. He traces a line to her ear before withdrawing and leaning in for a kiss before she covers his mouth with a fast hand.

“Ah ah…” she chides him. “Are you holding your end of the deal?”

He smiles. “What cookies?”

“Good,” she replies, closing the distance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hm… maybe… just _maybe_ i need to write the smut half of this story.


End file.
